Category: biztech

Today, two former industry analysts (who are now Veeam execs) discuss the trends that are shaping the data protection industry and IT landscape:Jason Buffington@JBuff, former Principal Analyst for Data Protection at ESGDave Russell@BackupDave, former VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, lead analyst for the Backup MQ
This week, we’re talking about how tape is NOT dead:

A fresh look at the old media

Regulatory considerations for long-term retention

What about the cloud (instead)?

Jason and Dave are now both VPs working on various aspects of Veeam’s strategy. If either of them, or Veeam, can help you, please let us know.
We’ll see you back here next week – thanks for watching.

Veeam Software narrowly missed its goal to become a $1 billion revenue company in 2018, falling $37 million shy and probably six months short.
Veeam founder and executive vice president Ratmir Timashev said Veeam finished 2018 with $963 million in bookings revenue after 16% growth over 2017. Timashev said he expects to break $1 billion for the trailing 12 months by the end of the second quarter of 2019.
Timashev said it was a “slight disappointment” to miss the billion-dollar Veeam revenue goal for the year. He said Veeam revenue came up a bit short because it “under invested” in its traditional SMB and commercial markets to concentrate on moving into the enterprise. But he predicted the enterprise strategy — including reseller deals with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, NetApp and Lenovo — will lead to greater growth in the long run.
The Veeam revenue growth also slowed last year, after 36% growth during 2017. Fresh off a $500 million investment from Insight Venture Partners in January, Timashev said privately held Veeam will pursue acquisitions and chase more multi-cloud customers to grow in 2019.
“For us, 2019 is the most important year in the history of the company,” Timashev said. That’s because of a shift in the industry to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud use, and the battle to win that market. Timashev said the latest update to Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 plays into that strategy. Update 4 focused on facilitating tiering and migrating data into public clouds.

New executive team, new dreams ahead

Veeam has a slightly new look to its executive team in early 2019 than it had at the start of 2018, although the new bosses are really the same as the old bosses. The departure of co-CEO Peter McKay in October left Timashev’s founder partner Andrei Baronov as the lone CEO. Baronov runs product strategy, research and development. Timashev handles sales and marketing in place of McKay, and executive vice president of operations William Largent remains in charge of legal and finance.
Largent joined Veeam in 2008 – two years after Timashev and Baronov started the company – and the trio worked together at Aelita Software before that. All three have held the Veeam CEO job during the company’s lifetime.
Veeam has been profitable since 2009, Timashev said. He said the vendor had $800 million in cash and investments before the recent half-billion dollar investment from Insight Venture Partners. But it has not invested much in acquisitions over the years. In late 2017, Veeam bought AWS data protection company N2WS in its first acquisition in 10 years and it has not bought another company since then.

Ratmir Timashev

That is expected to change in 2019. Timashev would not disclose potential acquisition targets but said Veeam has some gaps in cloud data management. Other potential technologies Veeam could acquire include analytics, machine learning/artificial intelligence, data compliance and data governance.Container protection is another area Veeam is exploring in 2019, following inquiries from customers.
Veeam is also expanding internally. The vendor plans to add 500 software developers to its research and development office in Prague. Veeam has about 3,500 employees worldwide with plans to add an additional 1,000 this year.
Timashev said Veeam’s Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is its “fastest growing product of all time.” About 55,000 organizations have downloaded the Office 365 backup, representing more than 7 million user mailboxes, according to Veeam.
Timashev said he expects $175 million in Veeam revenue from its enterprise hardware customers in 2019. He said Veeam will continue to partner with hardware vendors rather than follow rivals Commvault, Veritas and Dell EMC into selling branded appliances.

Vice President of Americas Partner Sales recognized
as one of CRN’s Top 50 Most Influential Channel
Chiefs

Congrats to Kevin Rooney, Vice President of Americas
Partner Sales at Veeam®, for being named to CRN’s
Top 50 Most Influential Channel Chiefs list. This elite
group is drawn from the larger pool of channel chief
honorees in the IT channel, who excel at driving growth and
revenue in their organization through channel partners.

When I was a part-time CTO for hospitals prior to joining Veeam, I was focused on outcomes: understanding how technology choices ultimately affect the clinical and patient experience with a goal of improved patient outcomes and higher satisfaction. I said as much to a West Coast health system CIO when presenting a strategy, and he said to look even further: the true outcome of technology choice in healthcare is the health and well-being of the community at large.
That has been with me ever since and helped shape Veeam’s mission in healthcare — improving the health of our communities by assuring Availability of your healthcare information with simple, reliable, flexible backup and recovery software. Wherever your applications and data go, whatever platform whether on-premises or in the cloud, we protect it easily so your team can focus on the clinical experience and the health of your communities.

Profile of Veeam’s healthcare customers

Fig. 1: Veeam Top Thirty Customers’ EHR Platforms

Veeam healthcare highlights:

12,000+ healthcare customers worldwide

4,300+ healthcare customers in North America

150,000+ clinical applications protected

30-40% TCO reduction reported by customers

Net Promoter Score nearly 3x the industry average over 10 years

Our top thirty customers run every major EHR platform and report substantial savings for the systems we protect. They love our software because it is powerful, easy, and we deliver piece of mind for a critical function: the last line of defense against failure of all kinds. Our customers have used the savings realized by investment in Veeam software to purchase new MRI machines that directly affect the health of the communities they serve. Here are a few other examples: Greenville Health, Roswell Park Cancer Inst, Rochelle Community Hospital, Butler Health.

HIMSS19: Foundations need modernization too

More than 45,000 healthcare professionals will assemble in Orlando for HIMSS19 2/11-2/15 to discuss every challenge of healthcare transformation from care and payment optimization to clinical application strategy and healthcare information security.
Amid the trending topics of artificial intelligence, genomics, interoperability, and the omnipresent challenges of mergers and acquisitions, we must also give time to technology platform basics: agile infrastructure consumption models, rapid scale, data and application portability to cloud, data and information stewardship, business continuity, and assured recovery. Those all sound like table stakes: critical functions that we should have well in hand.
Much of it is not well in hand, however, surveys continue to report gaps in business continuity plans, phishing and ransomware continue to cause service interruptions, and organic disruptive events will continue to affect the Availability of applications and the delivery of care regardless of the technology investments we make. Add to this the further adoption of off-premises platform options from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, Software as a Service applications such as Microsoft Exchange Online, and we require new solutions and practices to ensure protection of healthcare information and the Availability of related clinical applications.

Closing thoughts

Foundations are easy to lose sight of, overshadowed by more visible elements above, but without attention and modernization, all that is built upon them is at risk.
Please visit us at HIMSS19 Booth #4191 to hear our story and see for yourself how we can make a difference in your data center and the community you serve.

Two weeks ago, IBM was a launch partner with Veeam for the release of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 with support for IBM Cloud Object Storage. This week, Veeam is showcasing our combined solution offerings for Intelligent Data Management with IBM at IBM’s worldwide THINK event in San Francisco.
So, what do we expect from this week at IBM Think? For one, it’s all about the data. But not just data and how to deal with the crushing growth of data that all companies struggle with. This event focuses on how you manage data strategically and what you can do with it to drive business.
A few years ago, many believed that the cloud’s most common use case for data was backup or disaster recovery. Today, it is the unlockable value of data, and the added agility of that data (enabled by it being in a cloud), and what you can learn from it with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
IBM’s extensive IBM Cloud platform, with Watson, is all about helping you build a cloud strategy for your data and applications that helps you migrate and modernize, do more with your data and manage your multi-cloud investment.Don Boulia, IBM Cloud General Manager, told the worldwide Veeam audience on our Veeam Update 4 broadcast that his role was to help as many companies to the cloud as he can, and to make it as quick, easy and painless as possible. One of the IBM-Veeam synergies Don pointed out was Veeam’s role in helping customers move to the cloud, allowing IBM Cloud to deliver the same data protection and resiliency that companies have come to expect from managing on-premises data.
IBM and Veeam are Better Together and a logical choice for harnessing the power of the cloud for data Availability:

IBM’s broader Global Services organization has been accelerating the business value of IT (and its data) for years, so coupling IBM Cloud and Veeam’s Intelligent Data Management capabilities makes sense.

IBM’s Resiliency Services provide the expertise that is the real difference between simply ensuring the recoverability of data and the assurance of continuity of operations during crises.

And of course, the data you bring to the cloud becomes more valuable once it is there. IBM Cloud’s artificial intelligence unlocks the value hidden in data, not just mining insights, but actually putting them to work for you with machine learning.

The more valuable the data, the more it is worth protecting with Veeam solutions. IBM Think gives Veeam a chance to show what we can do with and for IBM customers in their data center, on IBM Cloud and across a multi-cloud environment.

Veeam Availability Suite, which is quickly and easily provisioned directly from the IBM Cloud portal, helps customers migrate to and keep data available in the hybrid cloud regardless of its location.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 on IBM Cloud eliminates the risk of losing access and control over your Office 365 data, allowing you to back up and retain highly-valuable online Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business data.

So, if you are at IBM Think this week, think about how IBM and Veeam are Better Together for the data that drives your business. Come see us and let’s talk about how IBM and Veeam can protect your valuable data assets wherever it is today and where it will be tomorrow.Show more articles from this author

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

MARLBOROUGH, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ExaGrid®, a leading provider of intelligent hyperconverged storage for backup, today announced that since 2009, ExaGrid has continued to provide American Standard with fast and reliable data backups and restores throughout the evolution of the company’s IT environment and substantial data growth.

A subsidiary of LIXIL, American Standard has innovated and created residential and commercial products for kitchen and bath for over 140 years.
American Standard has backed up its data to ExaGrid systems for nearly a decade, and ExaGrid has kept backups efficient and reliable throughout the evolution of American Standards’ IT environment and its major data growth resulting from the company becoming acquired by LIXIL Water Technology Americas (LWTA), a Tokyo-based global leader in housing and building materials, products, and services. “Since the acquisition, our data has grown almost 20% each year. LIXIL has continued to acquire other companies and their data has been migrated into our environment, resulting in significant data growth,” said Ted Green, American Standard’s lead information technology engineer.
ExaGrid’s data deduplication has maximized disk space and reduced rack space in American Standard’s data centers. “ExaGrid is very effective at reducing our backup storage footprint, allowing us to maximize disk space,” said Steve Pudimott, manager of IT services for American Standard. “We’ve always had one dedicated rack for ExaGrid. Now it has shrunk to half a rack at our production data center. That’s pretty significant, and it’s saved us on costs since we pay for power in our data center because it’s a colocation. Without deduplication, we’d probably need well over two racks by now, but we’ve been able to decrease from one rack to just half of a rack. The newer models of ExaGrid appliances are much smaller and shorter, so that has also helped us save on rack space, too,” added Green.
Recently, American Standard decided to virtualize its environment, shifting much of it over to VMware and installing Veeam to manage its virtual backups. ExaGrid integrates seamlessly with all of the most frequently used backup applications, including Veeam, which American Standard uses to back up its virtual environment, and Veritas NetBackup, which is used for the remaining physical servers. “At the time that we virtualized, our ExaGrid support engineer helped us configure our system to work with Veeam, and that was an easy process. When we installed Veritas NetBackup 16 recently on one of our servers, it took all of ten minutes to get it working with ExaGrid, and the ExaGrid plugin to work with NetBackup’s OST has been a great feature that has significantly sped up our backups,” said Green.
Since the initial installation of the first ExaGrid systems, Green has taken advantage of ExaGrid’s trade-in program, which allows customers to swap out older-model appliances for new ones at a discounted rate. “The capacity at both our production site and our disaster recovery (DR) site have doubled, if not tripled, since we first installed ExaGrid, so we have added appliances over the years. Working with ExaGrid’s sales and customer support teams is a major reason why we have continued to use ExaGrid for so many years.”
Read the complete American Standard customer success story to learn more about the company’s experience using ExaGrid.
ExaGrid’s published customer success stories and enterprise stories number over 360, more than all other vendors in the space combined. These stories demonstrate how satisfied customers are with ExaGrid’s unique architectural approach, differentiated product, and unrivalled customer support. Customers consistently state that not only is the product best-in-class, but ‘it just works.’About ExaGridExaGrid provides intelligent hyperconverged storage for backup with data deduplication, a unique landing zone, and scale-out architecture. ExaGrid’s landing zone provides for the fastest backups, restores, and instant VM recoveries. Its scale-out architecture includes full appliances in a scale-out system and ensures a fixed-length backup window as data grows, eliminating expensive forklift upgrades. Visit us at exagrid.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. See what our customers have to say about their own ExaGrid experiences and why they now spend significantly less time on backup.ExaGrid is a registered trademark of ExaGrid Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Beyond traditional backup use cases, one of the most important capabilities Veeam Backup & Replication provides you as a customer is the ability to proactively leverage data. It also allows you to be smarter about what you do with the gold mine of data you have wrapped up in backups that are sitting idle and to improve operational efficiencies, increase speed to market and even leverage existing data to improve compliance and security.
Veeam Backup & Replication Update 4, along with a huge payload of other features, focuses on the leveraging of data and transitioning from being reactive to becoming more proactive with this valuable resource. This proactivity comes in the form of our new Veeam DataLabs. A few of Veeam DataLabs’ capabilities have been customer favorites for years, including SureBackup and SureReplica to verify recoverability, as well as On-Demand Sandbox to speed up application deployment and address several DevOps and Dev Test concerns. Now, Update 4 introduces Veeam DataLabs Staged Restore and Veeam DataLabs Secure Restore to address compliance and security use cases as well. Find out more about Veeam DataLabs.

Veeam DataLabs Staged Restore

What business can afford a data breach? Today, a breach often includes a guaranteed barrage of negative publicity, loss of trust from loyal customers, as well as the possibility of a decrease in future business, not to mention, fines!
According to a recent study, the average total cost of a data breach is $3.86 million, which is a 6.4% increase over 2017 (Source: 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study: Global Overview, July 2018, conducted by Ponemon Institute LLC). This is why our first and most important new Veeam DataLabs use case focuses on GDPR and Article 17 (the right to erasure). This article applies to many of our customers who hold data from European citizens (regardless of their organization’s geographic location) and therefore must adhere to new data-compliance regulations or face a fine of up to 3% of their global turnover.
In the event that you lose critical data in production and are forced to restore the data, we are hopeful that backups exist, which have been tested with SureBackup to verify that the VM, application and OS are in good working order. SureBackup provides Veeam customers with peace of mind and reassurance that their backups have been successfully booted and tested for recoverability. However, while verifying backup recoverability is an effective first step to recovery, as of May of 2018, most businesses still need an effective way to also ensure compliance during this process. What if the backup being restored contains sensitive data protected by GDPR regulations? Leveraging the capabilities of Veeam DataLabs Staged Restore helps simplify this process.
Let’s look at this process before and after the introduction of GDPR and use a construction company as an example. Suppose this company is contractually required to keep data related to a new housing development for 25 or more years. This data may include supporting emails, contacts, reports, quotes, inquiries, etc. associated with the build. Eventually, the company may use this data to determine which showrooms were most popular, which customers preferred specific designs, etc. to improve their business and marketing tactics. In this case, the company would retain this data in their backups, which is permitted by GDPR regulations; however, any of the data that customers have requested to be removed and flagged for erasure under the “right to be forgotten” clause should never return to a production environment or workflow.
Therefore, before May 2018 and the introduction of GDPR, if the construction company needed to restore a backup including this data, the restore process would be managed in the following manner:

Fast forwarding to May 25, 2018, the next image shows how Veeam DataLabs Staged Restore helps the construction company perform a restore. It shows how they simultaneously remain compliant with GDPR’s Article 17 “Right to be Forgotten,” ensuring the data is successfully restored, but also that all sensitive data included in the backup is effectively removed and therefore never returns to the production environment.

Another prevalent use case often performed by our users is testing and updating patches. Most users prefer to test their patches and roll them out to a production environment with SureBackup. Before Update 4, users would oftentimes lose their tests and replicate within their production environment. Using Veeam DataLabs Staged Restore, this action can be done as part of the restore, with changes within the production environment, therefore removing a redundant step.

Veeam DataLabs Secure Restore

Like compliance, we know that malware is also a major concern. In 2017, there was a significant increase in press coverage around the security of private and sensitive data, most of which was due to the increased threat of ransomware. More data was lost or stolen in the first half of 2017 (1.9 billion records) than in ALL of 2016 (1.37 billion) and that was before the most significant breaches of the year (Source: Breach Level Index).
And the truth is, malicious attacks won’t stop any time soon. Ransomware attacks are predicted to continue in frequency and aggression as they become more sophisticated and harder to stop, and this issue has proven to be top-of-mind for Veeam customers. In fact, a recent ESG study indicated that 70% of our customers are concerned about their backups being contaminated (Source: ESG Master Survey Results, 2018 Data Protection Landscape Survey, October 2018).
Ransomware is a form of malicious malware that takes systems and data hostage, either by locking the user out completely or locking files so they can’t be accessed. The most common action by hackers is to encrypt files and force users to pay a ransom via cryptocurrency to get the decryption key.
Typically delivered through a link, ransomware is usually activated once a user clicks a link, which makes it possible for the virus to take over and spread to the rest of the corporate network.
The customer is then given instructions on how to send payment. Other, more aggressive forms of ransomware exploit security holes to infect systems. NotPetya and WannaCry were two such attacks this year.
It’s important to note that Veeam DataLabs Secure Restore does not prevent ransomware or other malicious attacks. However, this unique, patent-pending capability allows for a pre-staging scan from third-party, anti-virus integrations. This means that when a customer attempts to recover their files, they can verify that their backups are safe and virus-free before recovering, ultimately ensuring the threat has been removed from their network.
For ease of articulating this and the associated issues and problems, the diagram below depicts a typical timeline when a customer is hit with a zero-day attack. Currently, the biggest problem in the industry is that anti-virus vendors lack an adequate fix for a zero-day attack.

In this common timeline example, how do organizations know how much and which data has been compromised and unreadable?
With Update 4, as an added optional step for all non-granular restores inside the restore wizard, Veeam DataLabs Secure Restore will allow customers to scan backups before restoring them to production. The wizard will also include additional options if an infection is identified.
For additional assurance, this process allows for the mount server’s anti-virus software to be fully up to date with virus definitions, and multiple anti-virus vendors can perform a scan.

In the diagram above, you can see that the initial step is to select the restore point required on the Veeam management server. When the backup file is located, disks for the infected machine(s) are mounted to the Veeam mount server. The next stage then allows the anti-virus software to perform a scan against the attached disk.
As part of the recovery wizard, you then have three response options:

If no infections are found, you can continue with the restore

If an infection is found, but you need to proceed, Veeam will disable the network adapters for further investigation

If an infection is found, you can abort the recovery

This feature provides organizations the ability to recover back to a safe, uncompromised backup restore point. The ability to pinpoint the time of infection or the time it was infected and working back from that point allows for a safe and secure process for recovering data after a malicious attack. The diagram below depicts the new process of secure data recovery when utilizing Veeam DataLabs Secure Restore.

BAAR, Switzerland–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Veeam® Software, the leader in Backup solutions that enable Intelligent Data Management™, today announced results from fiscal year 2018, fresh off of a $500 million investment from Insight Venture Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) in early January – one of the largest investments in the history of storage software. Veeam delivered $963 million in total bookings – 16 percent growth year-over-year (YoY) and its 12th consecutive year of organic double-digit bookings growth, as it added 48,000 new customers in 2018, an average of 4,000 new customers each month. This strong customer momentum and bookings growth builds on 2017 results outpacing the industry, and validates the growing demand for Veeam Intelligent Data Management solutions in businesses of all sizes across the globe.

“Opportunities of data management, compliance and risk, data theft and cybercrime, are expected to continue to present businesses with challenges throughout 2019, and into the next decade. What we have seen in 2018 is that no data is entirely secure. Customers are looking for an approach to manage data that unlocks its use and potential to drive business transformation but doesn’t lock their data into one vendor or increase their risk exposure,” said Ratmir Timashev, co-founder and Executive Vice President (EVP) of Sales & Marketing at Veeam.

Timashev added: “By strengthening our offering via our most powerful partnerships with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), NetApp, Cisco, and now Lenovo, Veeam has done just that. We are leading the industry by empowering businesses to do more with their data backups, providing new ways for organizations to generate value from their data, while solving other business opportunities. Veeam has yet again achieved consistent company growth and profitability in this transformative market of data management in Hybrid-Cloud – and Veeam will continue to dominate. Together, with our partners, customers and alliances, and with our recent announcement of general availability for new cloud data management capabilities as part of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4, our most important product launch in company history, we have solidified our position as the dominant leader in Intelligent Data Management and one of the largest private software companies in the world.”

2018 Customer, Product and Partner Highlights

Veeam announced RTM for new cloud data management capabilities as part of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4, followed by recent general availability. This was one of the most important and anticipated releases to date for Veeam, providing simple, flexible and reliable solutions to help customers migrate to and keep data available in the hybrid cloud regardless of its location. These new capabilities – Cloud Tier, Cloud Mobility, and new data governance capabilities – allow Veeam to deliver virtual, physical, and cloud data management, for any application, and any data, across any cloud.

Veeam for Windows and Linux physical servers and workstations (Veeam Agents) and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 were the fastest growing products in Veeam’s history with 129 percent and 549 percent YoY respectively. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 has now been downloaded by more than 55,000 organizations, representing over 7 million user mailboxes.

Cloud has been the fastest growing segment of Veeam’s business for the past 8 quarters. Veeam reported 46 percent YoY growth in its overall cloud business for 2018.

N2WS, a Veeam company and a leading provider of cloud-native backup and disaster recovery for Amazon Web Services (AWS), grew annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 83 percent YoY.

Recognized twice as Microsoft ISV Partner of the Year, Veeam is now generating 1.9 million hours of Microsoft Azure consumption every month.

As the most impactful and profitable Veeam alliance in 2018, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) achieved the highest magnitude of revenue growth YoY for joint closed deals in 2018, supported with a move to a Global Supply Chain agreement increasing, the resell capabilities for resellers and customers. Mutual investments by both HPE and Veeam are expected to fuel continued commitment and accelerated pipeline growth in 2019.

Through participation in Cisco Solutions Plus program, Veeam and Cisco deals grew 967 percent YoY, an example of how easy it is for partners to quote and configure Veeam and Cisco data center solutions through a single ordering system. Veeam expanded its collaboration with Cisco to deliver Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex™ – a new, highly resilient data management platform that provides seamless scalability, ease of management, and support for multi-cloud environments through Cisco support services.

Veeam expanded the success of the NetApp alliance from product integration to a full resell agreement that includes NetApp Data Fabric solutions. Veeam launched its Global Resell agreement with NetApp in Q1 2018 and followed that by enabling NetApp customers to purchase joint NetApp ONTAP and Veeam Availability solutions from joint resell partners around the globe.

Veeam expanded and strengthened its partnership with Nutanix by launching Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV in July 2018. After just 2 quarters of this product being available, downloads have increased 500 percent.

Veeam announced a new global partnership with Lenovo to offer customers integrated solutions combining high-performance storage with trusted data protection which is sold directly from Lenovo and its resellers in a single transaction.

Veeam Operational Investments and Executive Appointments

Veeam heavily invested in its team throughout 2018, most notably announcing a plan to invest $150 million to expand its main Research and Development (R&D) Center in Prague as it continues its history of trailblazing innovation. The investment allows Veeam to attract an additional 500 software developers, adding to its current workforce of more than 3,500 employees worldwide with plans to add an additional 1,000 employees this year.

Two Veeam executive roles were recently appointed to accelerate the company’s geographical expansion: Paul Strelzick, GM & SVP of Sales, Americas and Daniel Fried, GM & SVP, EMEA. Strelzick most recently served as an advisor and consultant to Insight Venture Partners. Prior to this, he was the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales at SolarWinds for 10 years. Having specialized in building efficient and seamless marketing and sales pipeline operations, Strelzick is ideally placed to drive Veeam’s Americas business in line with priorities. Previously retired from Veeam in 2017 as the SVP of Sales & Marketing, EMEA, Fried has returned to Veeam and will now oversee EMEA’s strategic direction and expansion across all segments, working to enhance partner opportunities and increase share in emerging markets.

“The data protection and replication software market remains a dynamic, competitive industry with global revenue exceeding $7 billion and forecast to grow 4.3 percent annually,” said Phil Goodwin, Research Director, IDC. “Veeam has continued to expand the depth and breadth of its data availability solutions as evidenced by today’s Cloud Data Management announcement. Additionally, Veeam intends to use the recent Insight Venture Partners investment to help fuel continued double-digit growth.”

Registration is now open for VeeamON 2019, the world’s premier event for Intelligent Data Management, which will take place May 20 – 22, 2019, in Miami, FL. Nearly 10,000 customers, partners and influencers attended VeeamON 2018 in Chicago, IL and the regional VeeamON Forum events held all around the world.

About Veeam Software

Veeam is the leader in backup solutions that enable Intelligent Data Management. Veeam Availability Platform is the most complete back-up solution for helping customers on the journey to achieving success in the 5 Stages of Intelligent Data Management. Veeam has 330,000+ customers worldwide, including 82% of the Fortune 500 and 66% of the Global 2,000, with customer-satisfaction scores at 3.5x the industry average, the highest in the industry. Veeam’s global ecosystem includes 61,000+ channel partners; Cisco, HPE, NetApp and Lenovo as exclusive resellers; and 21,000+ cloud and service providers. Headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, Veeam has offices in more than 30 countries. To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com or follow Veeam on Twitter @veeam.

With several multinational data centres set to arrive in South Africa over the coming 18 months, businesses and consumers alike are starting to view the cloud and the availability of data differently.
By Kate Mollett, regional manager for Africa South at Veeam
The country is set to enter an exciting new digital landscape that is geared towards unlocking the true potential behind the vast amounts of data companies have stored. However, this requires a different approach to business continuity, disaster recovery, and intelligent data management.
Already, more traditional businesses are investigating the benefits that the cloud have to offer them. Once regarded as something limited to ICT firms, the cloud has now become an acceptable strategy for other sectors of the market, none more so than small to medium enterprises. This is an especially effective way for smaller companies who do not have a clearly defined IT strategy to compete more effectively with their larger counterparts.
Fundamentally, decision-makers, irrespective of organisation size and sector, need to embrace the cloud if they are to become truly digital and available. The mind shift has already started to happen where organisations are seeing the cloud and the availability of data as more of a utility instead of a luxury. As an enabler to move away from legacy IT obstacles, the cloud brings with it many advantages especially around data management and analysis.
All sizes
Additionally, some organisations cannot afford enterprise-grade security. But by going the cloud route, they get access to a secure environment from the service provider. It is the same with data backup and availability. All these elements are inherent to a cloud environment.
For management, this means focusing less on the day-to-day operations and more on the strategic value they can deliver for stakeholders thanks to better data analysis and management tools available through the cloud. Furthermore, business continuity becomes a more seamless prospect as it is embedded in cloud operations.
People expect to have services and information available to them at a time that suits them. The idea of normal business hours is a thing of the past. Fortunately, a cloud-driven environment sees the resources always accessible and available to deliver value for end users.
No business can afford downtime in the digital world. It has a significant negative impact on organisational success and can quickly become a crisis if the data is not available when it is needed most. Not only does this result in significant financial damage, but reputational as well which many companies could find difficult recovering from, if at all.
Data-driven insights
Additionally, the business also needs access to data to extract meaningful insight for operations and more refined solutions. Those companies that embrace the cloud, especially when it comes to the potential for data analysis, are the ones that will get a much-needed competitive advantage.
SMEs who use these cloud-based solutions will have a vital edge over larger businesses who do not. They can quickly adapt to changes in the market, get better insights into customer requirements, and build their data for even more meaningful insights.
IT is not relegated to the server room any longer. It permeates every facet of business today. Every division in an organisation and every employee requires access to data if they are to deliver strategic value. The silo approach of old is not relevant any more.
And when it comes to data and its availability, having the ability to collaborate between teams, business units, and geographic locations, result in a more effective environment where the business bottom-line can be greatly enhanced.
Thanks to the imminent arrival of several multinational data centres in the country, local businesses will start operating on par with global best practice when it comes to the cloud. The country is certainly ready for change and set for an exciting 2019 and beyond.

iland, a provider of secure cloud services and Veeam Impact Partner of the Year, has made a significant upgrade to its platform, Secure Cloud Console.
This release makes it the first cloud service provider to integrate the full suite of Veeam data protection solutions into a “single management console”, providing a single interface for customers to manage, monitor, and report on their disaster recovery services, cloud-based backups, and long-term archive strategies.
The update also includes improvements to historical usage, billing, and performance visibility in addition to self-service management capabilities for customers, including requesting additional resources, configuring disaster recovery automation, and testing DR strategy failover – supporting enterprise ambitions for control and agility.
“Business leaders are pursuing digital transformation and modernisation strategies to improve business agility, reduce costs, and spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time focused on innovation and growing market share,” says Veeam product strategy vice president Danny Allan.
“By creating a comprehensive data availability integration platform that combines backup, disaster recovery, and archive into a single solution, we can deliver on these critical customer needs. Veeam and iland combine the best of enterprise-class software and services, advanced data protection solutions, and the agility, availability and business acceleration of a global cloud platform designed for immediate business recovery.”
iland has been recognised as Veeam Impact Cloud & Service Provider Partner of the Year for North America in 2015 and 2017 and named Veeam Innovation Award Winner in 2018 and 2019.
“Maintaining availability of applications is becoming increasingly difficult given the rapid growth of data and the security risks that today’s modern organisations face,” says iland business development senior vice president Dante Orsini.
“This latest collaboration with Veeam, provides a hyper-available platform improving how our customers and partners access, manage and act on their data wherever it lives—on-premises or in the cloud.
“As a global leader in disaster recovery, iland now enables our customers, resellers and managed service providers to lower storage costs through support for archiving and further simplifies disaster recovery failover through direct integration with our award-winning Secure Cloud Platform.”

In every customer meeting I attend, “cloud” is mentioned within a matter of minutes. It’s the technology virtually every company is looking to embrace in some fashion, especially as businesses look to increase agility. However, there is always a doubt in customers’ minds over the management and protection of their data within these environments, and I spend a lot of time helping the organizations I meet alleviate their worries.

According to recent research[i], IT leaders are particularly concerned about portability, management and Availability of cloud workloads across their multi-cloud environments. What is the point in having data saved if you can’t access or move it when you want and need it? In fact, based on recent research it would seem:

47% are concerned that cloud workloads aren’t as portable as intended

58% indicate that migration of data and workloads to the cloud is challenging

61% are concerned about cloud workload backup and recovery

82% are concerned about application uptime

Valid concerns have arisen because quite frankly, traditional data management is not fit for purpose.

Today, Veeam addresses these issues by announcing a major step forward to meet the demands of businesses and further extend its leadership in cloud data management.

As a company, Veeam was born on virtualization and has rapidly adapted to customer needs to become the leader in Intelligent Data Management for hybrid cloud environments, thanks to the Veeam Availability Platform. In keeping with Veeam’s speed and momentum in the market, Veeam today announced new capabilities to expand its leadership in cloud data management with robust cloud-native data protection, easy cloud data portability, increased security and data governance, and solutions to make it easier than ever for service providers to deliver Veeam-powered services to market. This gives businesses the ability to get industry-leading cloud data management delivered as a managed service too.

With these latest announcements, Veeam bolsters its position as the clear market leader in cloud data management with strong partnerships with AWS, Microsoft Cloud, IBM Cloud and over 21,000 service providers. This is great news for customers, as they can now simply address many of the challenges with the migration, management and Availability of cloud workloads across their multi-cloud environments, through the easy-to-use Veeam platform they know and love.

Once again, Veeam has delivered a raft of innovations that answer specific customer needs that just work and help mitigate the top concerns of IT teams and business leaders. All of this and we are not even one month into the year. 2019 is clearly going to be a great year for Veeam customers!

“Veeam and iland combine the best of enterprise-class software and services, advanced data protection solutions, and the agility, availability and business acceleration of a global cloud platform designed for immediate business recovery.”

HOUSTON (PRWEB)January 23, 2019

iland, an industry-leading provider of secure cloud services and Veeam Impact Partner of the Year, today announced a significant upgrade to iland Secure Cloud Console. This new release includes integration with the full suite of Veeam data protection solutions. iland is the only cloud service provider to offer this ground-breaking level of Veeam data protection integration in a single management console.

The release of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 means iland now provides a single interface for customers to manage, monitor, and report on their disaster recovery services, cloud-based backups, and long-term archive strategies.

iland’s update also includes improvements to historical usage, billing, and performance visibility. This is in addition to full self-service management capabilities that enable customers to request additional resources, configure their disaster recovery automation, test their DR strategy, failover, and more. This delivers a level of transparency and flexibility that fully supports enterprise ambitions for control and agility. The update enables iland customers and partners to operate advanced strategies for business continuity and resilience while reducing the management burden on pressured IT departments.

As a result of these updates, users can now leverage a single, cost-effective solution to meet all their cloud data protection management needs, and significantly improve operational efficiency, productivity, and resource forecasting requirements. iland’s Secure Cloud Console, offering a single interface for customers who are using the entire Veeam protection framework, will be an attractive proposition.

“Business leaders are pursuing digital transformation and modernization strategies to improve business agility, reduce costs, and spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time focused on innovation and growing market share,” said Danny Allan, Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. “By creating a comprehensive data availability integration platform that combines backup, disaster recovery, and archive into a single solution, we can deliver on these critical customer needs. Veeam and iland combine the best of enterprise-class software and services, advanced data protection solutions, and the agility, availability and business acceleration of a global cloud platform designed for immediate business recovery.”

iland has been recognized as Veeam Impact Cloud & Service Provider Partner of the Year for North America in 2015 and 2017 and named Veeam Innovation Award Winner in 2018 and 2019. The partnership not only further validates iland’s industry-leading, cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services but also solidifies the joint offering towards digital transformation empowerment for business leaders.

Dante Orsini, Senior Vice President, Business Development, added: “Maintaining availability of applications is becoming increasingly difficult given the rapid growth of data and the security risks that today’s modern organizations face. This latest collaboration with Veeam, provides a hyper-available platform improving how our customers and partners access, manage and act on their data wherever it lives—on-premises or in the cloud. As a global leader in disaster recovery, iland now enables our customers, resellers and managed service providers to lower storage costs through support for archiving and further simplifies disaster recovery failover through direct integration with our award-winning Secure Cloud Platform.”

About ilandiland is a global cloud service provider of secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS). They are recognized by industry analysts as a leader in disaster recovery. The award-winning iland Secure Cloud Console natively combines deep layered security, predictive analytics, and compliance to deliver unmatched visibility and ease of management for all of iland’s cloud services. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, London, UK, and Sydney, Australia, iland delivers cloud services throughout America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Learn more at http://www.iland.com.

We are in the midst of a period of transformation in Healthcare: the transition from fee for service to fee for outcome. The net effect of this is cost pressure across healthcare systems, spawning programs to optimize the delivery of care, reduce cost, and find efficiencies across the board, including IT.

“Do more with less” has been the mantra of Healthcare IT leaders for the better part of a decade. The healthcare systems and hospitals that achieve the greatest savings avail themselves of choice in the marketplace, almost always having more than one solution in a given category.

Pick any data center function be it networking, security, compute, storage, database, monitoring, management, data protection, and you will be hard pressed to find a single solution that meets every need. There is a sound argument to be made both economically and intuitively that there are benefits to having at least two solutions in each category:

No two are truly identical

One will deliver better outcomes for certain use cases or possess specific features that deliver greater value

Choice allows the most efficient investment in each and the ability to respond to changing needs over time

Healthcare systems, hospitals, clinics, and practices make significant investments in Veeam and leverage a second solution to protect data that Veeam cannot. Let’s take a look at our largest customers: of Veeam’s top thirty North American healthcare customers, 64% run Epic. This is despite the fact that Veeam does not currently protect all of Epic (notably Web BLOB at scale) due to our present lack of NAS support. We also have more than 120 MEDITECH customer wins, new ones every quarter, yet we cannot presently deliver the specialized requirements to safely protect MEDITECH’s data volumes.

Why would hospitals protect thousands of systems with Veeam and use a second solution for the remainder?

They did the math.

Veeam is a case study in the value of coexistence in the data center. Veeam originally offered a solution to protect only virtual machines. When virtualization was new, it was a small portion of the data center. The adoption of Veeam added a data protection solution to their portfolio, and that has enabled them to capitalize on the value of choice, by expanding the solution that offered the greater value. Now with virtualized x86 representing the vast majority of the healthcare data center, Veeam customers realize substantial value — even though they continue to have needs that Veeam cannot yet meet.

Veeam customers conclude that using Veeam for the 80% of data center systems and applications for which Veeam is optimally suited results in a 30-40% reduction in the total cost of data protection for those systems. That is the value of coexistence. That is the value of choice. And as our portfolio continues to expand and offer solutions to address more specific healthcare application requirements, they’ll do the math again, and that will be the primary input to their next decision.

We are committed to supporting doctors, nurses, and patients by assuring the Availability of healthcare applications. We are committed to expanding the applications we protect so our customers can realize further savings whether virtualized, cloud, physical, Office365, or even AIX.

The value of coexistence is quite clear: it allows the realization of substantial savings and the agile adoption of the best solution. Explore your options and see why so many hospitals continue to add Veeam to their portfolio of data center solutions.

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

Cloud-focused data protection software developer Veeam Wednesday unveiled a new $500 million round of funding the company said will ensure its expansion into new areas around cloud data management and give it the leverage needed for acquisitions.
The new round means that Veeam has no need, and no plans, to move toward an IPO, said Ratmir Timashev, co-founder and executive vice president of sales and marketing for Baar, Switzerland-based Veeam.
The large funding round tops the $261 million round unveiled Tuesday by Rubrik, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based developer of data protection and cloud data management hardware and software.[Related: The 10 Hottest Storage Startup Companies Of 2018]
Veeam’s new round is significant on a number of levels, Timashev told CRN. Not only is it Veeam’s largest round of funding, it may be the storage industry’s largest funding round, Timashev said.
Prior to this round, total funding in Veeam amounted to about $32 million, including funding from the company founders and an early funding round from Insight Venture Partners of $15 million, he said.
Insight Venture Partners is the lead investor in this new round, with additional funding coming from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Timashev said Veeam does not need the new round to grow. “Veeam is a profitable company and generates a lot of cash,” he said. “Before this investment, we had $800 million in cash.”
Instead, Timashev said, the new $500 million round provides the freedom to scale the company and make acquisitions.
Veeam is already the fourth-largest provider of data protection software worldwide, and has the largest market share of any vendor in Europe, he said, citing IDC’s Software Tracker for Data Replication and Protection for the first half of 2018.
The company generated close to $1 billion in bookings and about $250 million in cash last year, and is taking 3 percent to 4 percent market share from competitors every year. “And we’ve been profitable for the last 10 years,” he said.
Veeam has a small acquisition record so far. The company in 2008 used its original funding to acquire a small company called nworks, and still sells the nworks Management Pack, although it is not a strategic focus.
The company in late 2017 acquired technology for data protection on Unix environments, particularly in IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris environments. Veeam in early 2018 also acquired N2WS, which Timashev said develops a leading technology for data protection in Amazon Web Services.
The new funding allows Veeam to follow through on some aggressive R&D plans with a combination of in-house R&D and acquisitions that accelerate the process, Timashev said.
“The next 10 years will see a focus on multi-cloud environments,” he said. “Whoever has data management technology for multi-cloud environments will be the winner. We know that customers will be looking to deploy cloud data management, archival, compliance, security, and container technology.”
Timashev acknowledged that the new investment from Insight Venture Partners in a company like Veeam, which is already profitable, does act to dilute current investors’ shares in the company. However, he said, the funding does more than give Veeam scale and flexibility.
While Insight Venture Partners remains a minority shareholder, it brings a wealth of knowledge and experience that Veeam can use as it grows, he said.
“Insight talks to 50,000 software companies globally each year,” he said. “It knows what customers are doing. It knows customers’ strategies.”
Unlike many of its competitors in the data protection market, Veeam has no hardware business, and can focus its development on its software business and work with other vendors as partners, Timashev said. These include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems, NetApp and Lenovo, all of which resell the Veeam offering, and Nutanix and Pure Storage, which partner with Veeam without reselling it, he said.
“Our business model is never hardware,” he said. “We would rather partner with system vendors.”

Choosing a public cloud service provider (CSP) has become a complex decision. Today, it’s no longer a question of which option you should work with, but rather, how to achieve optimal performance and distribute risk across multiple vendors—while containing cloud compute and storage costs at the same time.
In a recent Virtustream/Forrester survey of more than 700 cloud decision makers, 86% of respondents said that their enterprises are deploying workloads across more than one CSP. We learn from the same survey that the prime motivation for adopting a multi-cloud strategy is to improve performance, followed by cost savings and faster delivery times. Today, the three leading CSPs are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with respective market shares of 62%, 20%, and 12%.
In this post, the first in a two-part series, we will compare and contrast what AWS, Azure, and GCP offer in terms of storage, compute, and management tools. In the following post, we will discuss big data and analytics, serverless, machine learning, and more. Armed with this information, it should be easier for you to map out your multi-cloud strategy.

Service-to-Service Comparison

Enterprises typically look to CSPs for three levels of service: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, i.e., outsourcing of self-service compute-storage capacity); Platform as a Service (PaaS, i.e., complete environments for developing, deploying, and managing web apps); and secure, performant hosting of Software as a Service (SaaS) apps.
Keeping these levels in mind, we have chosen to compare:

Note: We won’t be comparing pricing since it is quite difficult to achieve apples-to-apples comparisons without a very detailed use case. Once you have determined your organization’s CSP requirements, you can use the CSP price calculators to check if there are significant cost differences: AWS, Azure, GCP.

Storage

The CSPs offer a wide range of object, block, and file storage services for both primary and secondary storage use cases. You will find that object storage is well suited to handling massive quantities of unstructured data (images, videos, and so on), while block storage provides better performance for structured transactional data. Storage tiers offer varying levels of accessibility and latency to cost-effectively meet the needs of both active (hot) and inactive (cold) data.
In terms of differentiators, Azure takes the lead in managed DR and backup services. When it comes to managing hybrid architectures, AWS and Azure have built-in services, while GCP relies on partners.

Compute

The CSPs offer a range of predefined instance types that define, for each virtual server launched, the type of CPU (or GPU) processor, the number of vCPU or vGPU cores, RAM, and local temporary storage. The instance type determines compute and I/O speeds and other performance parameters, allowing you to optimize price/performance according to different workload requirements. It should be noted that GCP, in addition to its predefined VM types, also offers Custom Machine Types.
The CSPs offer pay-as-you-go PaaS options that automatically handle the deployment, scaling, and balancing of web applications and services developed in leading frameworks such as Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, and more.
AWS offers auto scaling at no additional charge, based on scaling plans that you define for all the relevant resources used by the application. Azure offers auto scaling per app, or as part of platforms that manage groups of apps or groups of virtual machines. GCP offers auto scaling only within the context of its Managed Instance Groups platform.
Both AWS and Azure offer services that let you create a virtual private server in a few clicks, but GCP does not yet offer this capability.

Management Tools

As you may have already experienced, managing and orchestrating cloud resources across multiple business units and complex infrastructures can be a daunting challenge. All three CSPs offer platforms and services to streamline and provide visibility into the organization, configuration, provisioning, deployment, and monitoring of cloud resources. These offerings range from predefined deployment templates and catalogs of approved services to centralized access control. However, AWS and Azure seem to have invested more heavily in this area than GCP, and AWS even offers outsourced managed services (AWSManaged Services).

And the Winner Is…

In today’s multi-cloud world, you shouldn’t be seeking to identify a single “winner,” but rather how to optimally distribute workloads across multiple CSPs. As you map out your multi-cloud strategy, bear in mind that in the key categories of storage, compute, and management tools, AWS and Azure offer a more complete and mature stack than GCP. In general, AWS’ services and products are the most comprehensive, but they can also be challenging to navigate and manage. Also consider that if your company is already using Microsoft’s development tools, Windows servers, and Office productivity applications, you will find it very easy to integrate with Azure.
In the second part of this blog series, we will compare how the CSPs support next-generation technologies such as containers, serverless, analytics, and machine learning. We will also look at higher level issues, such as user friendliness, security, and partnership ecosystems, and provide some final thoughts on how to choose the right CSP(s) for your organization’s needs.Looking for an AWS Data Protection solution? Try N2WS Backup & Recovery (CPM) for FREE!

Veeam continues to deliver more content that you can
use in your demand generation efforts. Take a look at our new
whitepaper from Tech Target to help educate your customers and prospects
about why they should adopt cloud Backup as a Service (BaaS)
powered by Veeam.

Dave Russell, Vice President for Product Strategy at Veeam, outlines five intelligent data management needs CIOs need to know about in 2019.
The world of today has changed drastically due to data. Every process, whether an external client interaction or internal employee task, leaves a trail of data. Human and machine generated data is growing 10 times faster than traditional business data, and machine data is growing at 50 times that of traditional business data.
With the way we consume and interact with data changing daily, the number of innovations to enhance business agility and operational efficiency are also plentiful. In this environment, it is vital for enterprises to understand the demand for Intelligent Data Management in order to stay one step ahead and deliver enhanced services to their customers.
I’ve highlighted five hot trends in 2019 decision-makers need to know – keeping the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market in mind, here are my views:

Multi-Cloud usage and exploitation will rise

With companies operating across borders and the reliance on technology growing more prominent than ever, an expansion in multi-cloud usage is almost inevitable. IDC estimates that customers will spend US$554 billion on cloud computing and related services in 2021, more than double the level of 2016.
On-premises data and applications will not become obsolete, but that the deployment models for your data will expand with an increasing mix of on-prem, SaaS, IaaS, managed clouds and private clouds.
Over time, we expect more of the workload to shift off-premises, but this transition will take place over years, and we believe that it is important to be ready to meet this new reality today.

Flash memory supply shortages, and prices, will improve in 2019

According to a report by Gartner in October this year, flash memory supply is expected to revert to a modest shortage in mid-2019, with prices expected to stabilise largely due to the ramping of Chinese memory production.
Greater supply and improved pricing will result in greater use of flash deployment in the operational recovery tier, which typically hosts the most recent 14 days of backup and replica data. We see this greater flash capacity leading to broader usage of instant mounting of backed up machine images (or copy data management).
Systems that offer copy data management capability will be able to deliver value beyond availability, along with better business outcomes. Example use cases for leveraging backup and replica data include DevOps, DevSecOps and DevTest, patch testing, analytics and reporting.

Predictive analytics will become mainstream and ubiquitous

The predictive analytics market is forecast to reach $12.41 billion by 2022, marking a 272% increase from 2017, at a CAGR of 22.1%.
Predictive analytics based on telemetry data, essentially Machine Learning (ML) driven guidance and recommendations is one of the categories that is most likely to become mainstream and ubiquitous.
Machine Learning predictions are not new, but we will begin to see them utilising signatures and fingerprints, containing best practice configurations and policies, to allow the business to get more value out of the infrastructure that you have deployed and are responsible for.
Predictive analytics, or diagnostics, will assist us in ensuring continuous operations, while reducing the administrative burden of keeping systems optimised. This capability becomes vitally important as IT organisations are required to manage an increasingly diverse environment, with more data, and with more stringent service level objectives.
As predictive analytics become more mainstream, SLAs and SLOs are rising and businesses’ SLEs, Service Level Expectations, are even higher. This means that we need more assistance, more intelligence in order to deliver on what the business expects from us.

The ‘versatalist’ (or generalist) role will increasingly become the new operating model for the majority of IT organisations.

While the first two trends were technology-focused, the future of digital is still analogue: it’s people. Talent shortages combined with new, collapsing on-premises infrastructure and public cloud + SaaS, are leading to broader technicians with background in a wide variety of disciplines, and increasingly a greater business awareness as well.
Standardisation, orchestration and automation are contributing factors that will accelerate this, as more capable systems allow for administrators to take a more horizontal view rather than a deep specialisation.
Specialisation will of course remain important but as IT becomes more and more fundamental to business outcomes, it stands to reason that IT talent will likewise need to understand the wider business and add value across many IT domains.
Yet, while we see these trends challenging the status quo next year, some things will not change. There are always constants in the world, and we see two major factors that will remain top-of-mind for companies everywhere….

Frustration with legacy backup approaches and solutions

The top three vendors in the market continue to lose market share in 2019. In fact, the largest provider in the market has been losing share for 10 years. Companies are moving away from legacy providers and embracing more agile, dynamic, disruptive vendors, such as Veeam, to offer the capabilities that are needed to thrive in the data-driven age.

The pain points of the Three Cs: Cost, complexity and capability

These Three Cs continue to be why people in data centres are unhappy with solutions from other vendors. Broadly speaking, these are excessive costs, unnecessary complexity and a lack of capability, which manifests as speed of backup, speed of restoration or instant mounting to a virtual machine image. These three major criteria will continue to dominate the reasons why organisations augment or fully replace their backup solution.

The arrival of the first 5G networks will create new opportunities for resellers and CSPs to help collect, manage, store and process the higher volumes of data

In early 2019 we will witness the first 5G-enabled handsets hitting the market at CES in the US and MWC in Barcelona. I believe 5G will likely be most quickly adopted by businesses for Machine-to-Machine communication and Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Consumer mobile network speeds have reached a point where they are probably as fast as most of us need with 4G.
2019 will be more about the technology becoming fully standardised and tested, and future-proofing devices to ensure they can work with the technology when it becomes more widely available, and EMEA becomes a truly Gigabit Society.
For resellers and cloud service providers, excitement will centre on the arrival of new revenue opportunities leveraging 5G or infrastructure to support it. Processing these higher volumes of data in real-time, at a faster speed, new hardware and device requirements, and new applications for managing data will all present opportunities and will help facilitate conversations around edge computing.

When I first started working with Veeam Software before becoming a Veeam Vanguard and joining the Veeam Product Strategy Team, one of the things that was so appealing was that it was so easy to get started with and use.
Before I knew it, I was backing up and restoring virtual machines with ease. Now, I want to take a closer look at what makes Veeam products so easy to use and get started with.

Veeam just works

Like many people who love technology out there, I tend to leap before I look. Many times, beyond installation requirements I will not actually ready any how-to-get-started guides if I am working in a lab. Has this come back and bitten me at times? Sure it has, but with Veeam, it has not.
This goes beyond Veeam’s flagship product, Veeam Backup & Replication and extends to things like Veeam ONE, Veeam Availability Orchestrator, and extends to advanced features like storage integration. I haven’t met a Veeam product I found difficult to install.

Top-notch product documentation

After installing Veeam Backup & Replication and backing up and restoring a couple of virtual machines, I wondered what else I was missing. As it turns out, I was missing quite a lot! The good news is that Veeam product documentation is top notch.
When I was getting started with Veeam, I primarily worked with Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware vSphere. There were two documents I read from back to front:

Here is why these two documents are so useful.
The Veeam Backup & Replication Evaluator’s Guide for VMware vSphere (there is also one for Hyper-V if you prefer that hypervisor) covers key getting-started information like system requirements, among other things. It also walks you through the complete setup of Veeam Backup & Replication, and more importantly, it walks you through the process of performing your first backups and restores.
Beyond simply restoring a full VM, which as we know is not always required, the Evaluator’s Guide shows you how to restore:

Microsoft SQL databases

Guest OS files

VM virtual disks

VM files (VMDKs, VMXs, etc.)

Once you are comfortable with the basics of Veeam Backup & Replication, the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide has the full details of all the great things Veeam can do.
Some of my favorite things beyond the basics of Veeam Backup & Replication are:

The Veeam community

One of the greatest part of Veeam products is the community surrounding it. The Veeam community is huge, and there are a couple of ways to start interacting. First of all is the Veeam Community Forums, which is your one-stop shop on the web for interreacting with other Veeam users, as well as some great technology experts that work at Veeam. You can sign up for free for the Veeam Community Forums right here.
Next, we have the Veeam Vanguards. They are a great group of Veeam enthusiasts and IT pros who share their knowledge not only on the Veeam Community Forums, but on Twitter and on their blogs. Simply search for the #VeeamVanguard hashtag on Twitter to get started interacting with these great folks.
It could not be easier to get started using Veeam products. Veeam offers a free 30-day trial of many of their products, including the flagship Veeam Availability Suite, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE. You can download the free trial here.
If you are an IT pro, you can also get a completely free NFR license for Veeam Availability Suite. Be sure to fill out the request form here, and get started with Veeam in your lab.
The post Why it’s so easy to get started with Veeam appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

Peermont Hotels, Casinos and Resorts is an award-winning hospitality and entertainment company which operates 12 properties located across South Africa, Botswana, and Malawi. Renowned for its excellence in design, development, management, ownership, and operation of multifaceted hospitality and gaming facilities, guests partake in fine dining, relaxing hotel stays, exciting casino action, live entertainment, soothing spa treatments, efficient conferencing or sporting activities — offered in unique safe and secure, themed settings.
Hyper-availability of data and systems are fundamental to the success of the business, which led to Peermont turning to Veeam to implement its Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam ONE and Veeam Cloud Connect solutions.
“We do not have the luxury of a downtime window or shutting down over the weekend for system maintenance,” said Ernst Karner, Group IT Manager and CIO of Peermont Group.
“For us, customer service is fundamental and there are no allowances for not delivering a round-the-clock value proposition.
“Being a hospitality and entertainment company, we do not have the luxury of a downtime window or shutting operations over the weekend for system maintenance; we are always on the go with our business.”
Even though many other organisations have only recently started embracing the need to have hyper-available data, Peermont has been operating in this always-on environment since it opened its doors more than two decades ago.
“Historically, backing up and restoring data was not an easy proposition. We had multiple vendors claiming various features that sounded nice on paper, but the reality worked quite different. Unfortunately, no organisation can claim to not have any downtime or availability issues. The same can be said for us where drive failures were quite common in the past.”
Karner says restoring data is always used as a last resort because of the impact it could have on live systems.
“Before Veeam, we had a few incidents where recovery from our backups was not possible. We did not have the level of comfort that all our backups (stretching to more than 500 virtual machines, 275 terabytes of data, and 13 data centres) were done reliably. At the time, it was impossible to guarantee the entire company being recoverable in the event of a disaster.”
Karner says he understands customer expectations and feels that it is unforgivable in this day and age for systems to go down, irrespective of the industry a business operates in. For visitors, things like internet access (which is provided free to all customers at all Peermont properties) have become a commodity. If Peermont is unable to deliver this, people start becoming very unforgiving.
“Customers expect to have access to services at any time of day or night. As such, we had to review our capacity across all spheres of the business (network, disk storage, and compute availability). For us, there is no such thing as a Plan B. Uptime is critical and we identified Veeam as our partner of choice to address our hyper-availability requirements.”
However, unlike other businesses, Peermont requires its disaster recovery facilities to remain onsite due to its unique availability requirements. If systems go down there is an immediate financial impact on the business. However, it does supplement its on-premise business continuity strategy with a hosted component as additional fail-safe. For example, if central reservations are offline, no bookings can be made through any means. Guests will simply choose another hotel to stay at.
Similarly, if slot machines go down there is a real-time impact on revenues. Peermont can potentially lose considerable gross operating profit if downtime occurs. Not being available for two to three hours could therefore be disastrous to the business bottomline. Beyond the financial, the reputational damage could also be significant.
“Customers might forgive you once if systems are not available. But if this starts becoming an ongoing concern, they will migrate away from you to a competitor who can deliver on their expectations.”
Veeam therefore had to provide a strategic solution that could allay these concerns and provide Peermont with the peace of mind needed to deliver continuous services to customers.The Veeam solution
As a precursor to implementing Veeam Availability Suite, Peermont embarked on a virtualisation journey in 2005. Gradually it expanded to 70 hosts across the group moving away from physical business applications.
By improving efficiencies, Peermont can also keep costs down and run analysis on data to better understand customer needs.
“We have a centralised data warehouse that collects information from all our casinos,” added Karner.
“From supplier data and procurement systems to the requests we receive from tour operators require several Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes to manage effectively.”
From an intelligent data management perspective, Peermont is focused on delivering a completely integrated ecosystem designed to give customers the best value possible. It is about using the technology, data, and intelligence from the point of arrival to the point of departure.
“We identify guests from the moment they arrive at a property and tailor their experience according to the historical data and insights we have built on them,” said Karner.
“It is about using their preferences when it comes to where they dine, what they enjoy eating, what are their favourite tables to play at, and even what shows they prefer to watch, and creating a unique environment tailored to their needs.”
Customer satisfaction is therefore an essential deliverable, but this needs to be done without adding to the cost or making it a more complex environment. Beyond this balance, Peermont also needs to meet the regulatory requirements of the South African National and Provincial Gambling Boards.
Karner says this requires Peermont to deliver quarterly reports that show how data is backed up at casinos and illustrate its recoverability. This sees Peermont using a team of people requesting a tape from its storage facility, restoring it to a regulated part of the server, boot it up, and verify with the Gambling Board that the recovery was successful.
As part of these compliance fundamentals, Peermont must also make daily offsite backups of the regulated part of the server. Previously, this required tape cartridges to be delivered by courier to an external facility. And when the time came to restore the data, it was a time-consuming process of recalling the tapes. With Veeam Cloud Connect, this has changed as Peermont now has an agreement in place with an external cloud service for the secure storage of its regulated data. Veeam Cloud Connect completely automates the recovery and offsite storage of this data.
“Thanks to Veeam, we have been able to take a process that would take a day at each property, requiring numerous employees, and fully automate it to take 15 minutes,” said Karner.
“I sleep a lot better at night knowing I have a system that is reliable and can recover within minutes.”The Results

Automation of backup environment results in time and money savingsUsing Veeam, backups that previously took Peermont a day to complete at each of its properties can now be done in under 15 minutes. And with the configuration and maintenance of its hyper-available environment centralised using Veeam from the head office, Peermont can rest assured that lack of data access that could result in significant loss of revenue, is now a thing of the past.

Reliability and recoverability of backupsUsing Veeam, Peermont ensures the integrity of its backups and guarantees being able to restore critical data in the event of a disaster. With Veeam, its backups work without fail giving them confidence knowing that risk management is taken care of.

Scalability to cater for individual property requirementsVeeam scales according to the unique needs of each property in the Peermont Group. Whether it is a smaller casino with a limited number of virtual machines or head offices with continuously expanding data that runs into the terabytes, Veeam delivers on both ends of the spectrum

Kate Mollett, Regional Manager for Africa South at Veeam, said the company provided a strategic solution that could address all customer requirements and provide Peermont with the peace of mind needed to deliver continuous services to customers.
“They might operate casinos and hotels, but they needed to bet on a sure-thing, rather than take a roll of the dice,” she said.
“As an organisation, Peermont embraced hyper-availability from the day it opened its doors and required a partner to deliver on its own exacting expectations, to help it meet those of its high-class clientele. Veeam has dealt Peermont with the strongest hand possible to realise its data management goals and ensure the integrity of its backups.
“Veeam provides Peermont with the ability to restore critical data in the event of just about any disaster, rapidly. When it comes to data management, you don’t want to gamble with your reputation or your service delivery.”

Veeam updates to its flagship product and AWS data protection include the ability to migrate old data to cheaper cloud or object storage.
Update 4 of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is scheduled to be released this month to partners. General availability will follow at a date to be determined. Veeam’s flagship Availability Suite consists of Veeam Backup & Replication and the Veeam ONE monitoring and reporting tool.
The new Cloud Tier feature of Scale-out Backup Repository within Backup & Replication facilitates moving older backup files to cheaper storage, such as cloud or on-premises object storage, according to a presentation at the VeeamON Virtual conference this week. Targets include Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and S3-compatible object storage. Files remain on premises, but as only a shell.
The Veeam updates also feature Direct Restore to AWS. The process, which takes backup files and restores them into the public cloud, works in the same way as Veeam’s Direct Restore to Azure, said Michael Cade, technologist of product strategy.
A Staged Restore in the Veeam DataLabs copy data management tool helps with General Data Protection Regulation compliance, specifically the user’s “right to be forgotten,” Cade said. The DataLab can run a script removing personal data from a virtual machine backup, then migrate the VM to a production environment.
The Veeam updates also include ransomware protection. Also within Veeam DataLabs, the Secure Restore feature enables an optional antivirus scan to ensure the given restore point is uninfected before restoring. Veeam is not going to prevent attacks, but it can help with remediations, Cade said.
In addition, intelligent diagnostics in Veeam ONE analyze Backup & Replication debug logs, looking for known problems, and proactively report or remediate common configuration issues before impact to operations.

N2WS data protection tiers up

The Veeam updates include N2WS, a company it acquired at the end of last year. N2WS, which provides data protection for AWS workloads, released Backup & Recovery 2.4 last week, enabling users to choose from different storage tiers and reduce the cost of data requiring long-term retention.
The vendor launched Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshot decoupling and the N2WS-enabled Amazon S3 repository. Customers can move snapshots to the repository.
That repository saves up to 40% on costs, said Ezra Charm, vice president of marketing at N2WS.
“Data storage in AWS can get expensive,” especially if an organization is looking at long-term retention, for example at least two years, Charm said during the virtual conference.
Possible uses include archiving data for compliance in S3, a cheaper storage tier. Managed service providers can also use it to lower storage costs for clients.
In addition, the N2WS update features VPC Capture and Clone. That capability captures VPC settings and clones them to other regions, which eliminates the need for manual configuration during disaster recovery, according to N2WS. An enhanced RESTful API automates backup and recovery for business-critical data.
“Any of the data you store [in AWS] is clearly your responsibility,” Charm said.
AWS data protection is an emerging market. In June 2018, Druva acquired CloudRanger, another company that provides backup and recovery of AWS data.
While human error is the most likely scenario why AWS data protection is needed, Charm said, there are many other possible issues.
“Ransomware in AWS has been documented,” he said.
N2WS Backup & Recovery 2.4 is available now in the AWS Marketplace.

Changing Of The GuardVeeam co-founder Ratmir Timashev (pictured) expects the data availability software company to outpace the market for years to come. A 100 percent channel sales strategy, several powerful alliances with top hardware vendors including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems and NetApp, and a market hungry for cloud solutions are all working in the company’s favor, he said.The Baar, Switzerland, company’s co-CEO, Peter McKay, said Tuesday that he was leaving the company, kicking off a broader executive restructuring. Timashev said McKay made the decision to leave the company after accelerating its enterprise channel sales strategy, as well as its strategic alliance strategy.In the wake of McKay’s departure, Veeam made Timashev, who has in the past served as CEO, executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing. Co-founder Andrei Baronov, formerly co-CEO, is now the company’s sole chief executive.Timashev said Veeam has grown its data protection and replication business in the mid-20 percent range in recent years, and he expects to maintain that pace over the next couple of years. Cloud service providers are the company’s fastest-growing partner segment, he said, and an increasing number of traditional resellers lured by customer demand and huge margins are getting in on that action.What follows is an edited excerpt of CRN’s conversation with Timashev.

We all know that software and infrastructure don’t typically go away in the data center. You very rarely decommission something and bring in all new gear or stop the application to completely transition over to something else. Everyone’s in some sort of hybrid state. Some think that they’re transitioning, and many hopefully even have a plan for this.

Some of these changes are bigger, take longer, and you almost need to try them and experience them to have success in order to proceed. I’ve heard people say, “Well, we’re going to get around to doing X, Y, and Z.” But they are often lacking a sense of urgency to experiment early.

A major contributor to this type of procrastination is that changes that appear to be far off, arrive suddenly. The closing speed of transformation is the issue. Seldom do you have the luxury of time; but early on you are seldom compelled to decide. You don’t sense the urgency.

It is not in your best interest to say, “We’re just going to try to manage what we’ve got, because we’re really busy. We’ll get to that when we can.” Because then, boom, you’re unprepared for when you really need to actually get going on something.

A perfect example is the impact of the cloud on every business and every IT department. The big challenge is that organizations know they should be doing something today but are still struggling with exactly what to do. In terms of a full cloud strategy, it’s oftentimes very disaggregated. And while we’re going on roughly a decade in the cloud-era, as an industry overall, we’re still really in the infancy of having a complete cloud strategy.

In December of last year, when I asked people, “What’s your cloud strategy? Do you have one? Are you formulating one?” The answer was unfortunately the same response that they’ve been giving for the last eight years… “Next year.” The problem is that this is next year, and they are still in the same state.

When it comes to identifying a cloud strategy, a big challenge for IT departments and CIOs is that it used to be easy to peer into the future because the past was fairly predictable — whether it was the technology in data centers, the transformation that was happening, the upgrade cycle, or the movement from one platform to another. The way you had fundamentally been doing something in the past wasn’t changing with the future. Nor did it require radically different thinking. And it likely did not require a series of conversations across all of IT, and the business as well.

But when it comes to the cloud, we’re dealing with a fundamental transformation in the ways that businesses operate when it comes to IT: compute, storage, backup, all of these are impacted.

Which means organizations working on a cloud strategy have little, to no historical game plan to refer to. Nothing they can fall back on for a reference. The approach of, “Well this is what we did in the past, so let’s apply that to the future,” no longer applies. Knowing what you have, knowing what your resources are, and knowing what to expect are not typically well understood with regards to a complete cloud transformation. In part, this is because the business is often transforming, or seeking to become more digital, at the same time.

With the cloud, you often have limited, or isolated experiences. You have people who are trying to make business decisions that have never been faced with these issues, in this way, before.

Moving to absolute virtualization and a hybrid, multi-cloud deployment means that when it comes time to set a strategy you have a series of questions that need to be answered:

Do you understand what infrastructure resources are going to be required? No.

Do you understand what skills are going to be needed from your people? No.

Do you know how much budget to allocate with clarity, today, and over time? No.

Do you know what technologies are going to impact your business immediately, and in the near-term future? No.

Okay, go ahead and make a strategy now based on the information you just gave me, four No answers in a row. That’s pretty scary.

On top of this, data center people tend to be very risk averse by design. There’s a paralysis that creeps in. “Well, we’re not sure how we should get started.” And people just stay in pause mode. That’s part of why we see Shadow IT or Rogue IT. Someone says, “Well, I’m going to go out and I’m just going to get my own SaaS-based license for some capability that I’m looking for, because the IT department says they’re investigating it.”

Typically, what happens is the IT department is trying to figure that out, trying to get a strategy, investigate the request. But in the meantime, they say, “No.” Now the IT becomes the department of “no” and is not being perceived as being helpful.

To address this issue head on, you need to apply an engineering mindset. Meaning, that you learn more about a problem by trying to solve it. In absence of having a great reference base, with something that can easily be compared to, we should at least get going on what is visible to us, and that looks to be achievable in the short term.

An excellent example in the software as a service (SaaS) world is Microsoft Office 365. Getting the on-premises IT people participating in this can still be a challenge. As the SaaS solutions start to become more and more implemented, they’re sometimes happening outside of the purview of what goes on in the data center. This can lead to security, pricing and performance and Availability issues.

Percolate that up, what’s the effect of that? What does that actually mean? It means that the worst-case scenario is you’ve got an outcome of where the infrastructure operations people are increasingly viewed as less and less strategic going forward, because if you take this out to the extreme, you’ll end up being custodians of legacy implementations and older solutions. All while numerous other projects are being championed, piloted, put in to production and ultimately owned, by somebody else; perhaps a line of business that is outside of IT.

That’s where you see CIOs self-report that they think more than 29% of their IT spending is happening outside of their purview. If you think about that, that’s concerning. You’re the Chief Information Officer (CIO). You should know pretty close to 100% of what’s going on as it relates to IT. If your belief is that approaching a third of IT spending happens elsewhere, outside of your control, and that this outside spending is not really an issue, then what are you centralizing? What are you the Chief of, if this trend continues?”

The previous way of developing a strategic IT plan worked well in the past when you had an abundance of time. But that is no longer the case. Transformation is happening all around us and inside of each organization. You can’t continue to defer decisions. IT is now a critical part of the business; every organization has become digital and the cloud is touching everything. It is time to step up, work with vendors you trust, and move boldly to the cloud.

Please join me on December 5th for VeeamOn Virtual where I discuss these challenges as well as 2019 predictions, Digital Transformation, Hyper-Availability and much more. Go ahead and register for VeeamOn Virtual.

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, recognized Veeam®
with a 2018 CRN Tech Innovator Award. Veeam Availability Suite™ 9.5 took
top honors in the Data Management category!

These annual awards honor standout hardware, software and
services that are moving the IT industry forward. In compiling
the 2018 Tech Innovator Award list, CRN editors evaluated 300 products
across 34 technology categories using several criteria, including
technological advancements, uniqueness of features, and potential
to help solution providers solve end users’ IT challenges.

Who can forget that wonderful line from Forrest Gump in which Hanks talks about the beginning of his friendship with Jenny and how since that day, they were like “Peas and Carrots?” That’s how we like to think of Veeam and N2WS.

Veeam, a company born on virtualization, is the clear leader in Intelligent Data Management with significant investments and growth in the public cloud space. As part of our strategy to deliver the most robust data management and protection across any environment, any cloud, we’re always looking at ways to innovate and expand our offerings. And last year, we acquired N2WS, a leading provider of cloud-native backup and disaster recovery for Amazon Web Services (AWS); since the acquisition, Veeam and N2WS have accelerated N2WS’ revenue growth by 186% year over year, including 179% growth of installed trials of N2WS’ product, N2WS Backup & Recovery.

This latest release builds on the previous announcement where N2WS and Veeam launched new innovations to help businesses automate backup and recovery operations for Amazon DynamoDB, a cloud database service used by more than 100,000 AWS customers for mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, IoT, and many other applications that need low-latency data access. By extending N2WS Backup & Recovery to Amazon DynamoDB, businesses are now able to ensure continuous Availability and protect against accidental or malicious deletion of critical data in Amazon DynamoDB.

While the cloud delivers significant business benefits, based on the AWS shared responsibility model, businesses must still take direct action to guard data and enable business continuity in the event of an outage or disaster. We are now seeing unprecedented numbers of new customers turn to N2WS and Veeam to ensure their AWS cloud data is secure, including the University of Notre Dame, Cardinal Health and more.

As Veeam and N2WS continue to invest in the public cloud space, new innovations specifically designed for AWS environments will be available in early 2019, innovations that will deliver major advancements to customers across the globe. I’d love to share this with you now, but you’ll have to wait for Q1 2019 for the details.

But if you are at AWS re:Invent this week, please join our session “A Deeper Dive on How Veeam is Evolving Availability on AWS” on Wednesday, November 28 or visit us at booth #1011 throughout the week to hear more about our innovative approach to the public cloud, including where we are headed with archiving, mobility and more.

With Veeam’s momentum and growth across AWS data protection solutions, the company is well positioned as the market leader in Intelligent Data Management with an innovative focus on the public cloud. Ultimately, from being the peas and carrots and better together, we want to be the meat and potatoes for all our new joint customers where we are an integral part of their business and IT operations.

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

Three years ago the big question was: “On-prem or in-cloud?” Today’s answer is both, as the majority of companies adopt hybrid solutions. However, the question turns to the complexity of securing data that is dispersed over multiple platforms. Taking steps to solve this issue is N2W Software Inc.’s Backup & Recovery version 2.4, announced during AWS re:Invent 2018 this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“You have a single platform that can manage data protection both on- and off-premises so that you can leverage where is the best place for this workload and protect it across no matter where it chooses to live,” said Danny Allan (pictured, left), vice president of product strategy at Veeam Software Inc., was acquired N2W this past January.
Allan and Andy Langsam (pictured, right), chief operating officer at N2W Software, spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed the release of N2WS version 2.4 and the changing face of the back-up industry as it expands from security into predictive analysis. (* Disclosure below.)

Slashing storage costs

N2WS version 2.4 introduces snapshot decoupling into the AWS S3 repository, allowing customers to move backup EC2 snapshots into the much cheaper S3 storage, according to Langsam. Real customer savings are estimated to be 40 to 50 percent a month, he added.
“Anytime you can talk about cost reduction from five cents a gig on EC2 storage to two cents on S3, it’s a tremendous savings for our customer base,” Langsam said.
A recent survey conducted by N2WS showed that more than half of the company’s customers spend $10,000 a month or more on AWS storage costs. “If they can save 40 percent on that, that’s real, real savings,” Langsam stated. “[It’s] more than the cost of the software alone.”
N2WS has reported 189-percent growth in revenue since its January 2018 acquisition by Veeam, according to Allan. “We’ve got customers recently like Notre Dame and Cardinal Health, and then we have people getting into the cloud for the very first time,” he said.
Allan attributes this growth to the financial stability provided by having a parent company. “Being acquired has allowed us to focus on the customer and innovation versus going out and raising money from investors,” he stated.
Security concerns have catapulted back-up services into the spotlight, but their capabilities are starting to expand outside of just protection and recovery. “We’re moving away from just being reactive to business need to being proactive in driving the business forward,” Allan said.
Applying new technologies available through advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence allows data protection companies to offer suggestions to their clients that will increase productivity or reduce costs. “We [can] leverage a lot of the algorithms that are existing in clouds like AWS to help analyze the data and make decisions that [our clients] don’t even know that they need to make,” Allan said. “That decision could be, you need to run this analysis at 2:00 a.m. in the morning because the instances are cheaper.”
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS reInvent. (* Disclosure: Veeam Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veeam nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
[embedded content]

Photo: SiliconANGLE

Since you’re here …

… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.
The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.

Hosting hundreds of thousands of guests, an hour
of IT downtime would damage their reputation and cost millions
of dollars. With Veeam Availability 24.7.365, Hard Rock Hotel
& Casino has maintained loyalty, preserved brand value and saved
$150,000 per year.

Mission-critical apps on-premises, machine-learning apps on Google Cloud Platform, serverless apps on Amazon Web Services cloud — phew, it’s getting hectic in modern enterprise information technology. The number of clouds isn’t going to shrink anytime soon, so it would help if things like data backup and data management would fuse to keep the number of additional things to mess with manageable.
NetApp Inc. and Veeam Software Inc. have partnered to integrate their technologies so fans of both will have fewer things to fiddle with. NetApp for storage — and more recently, data management — and Veeam for backup go together like chocolate and mint creme. They cover a number of crucial steps along the path of that most valuable asset in digital business, data.
“But what makes it simple is when it is comprehensive and integrated,” said Bharat Badrinath (pictured, right), vice president of products and solutions marketing at Veeam. “When the two companies’ engineering teams work together to drive that integration, that results in simplicity.”
Badrinath and Ken Ringdahl (pictured, left), vice president of global alliance architecture at Veeam, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this week’s NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas. They discussed how the companies’ partnership is reshaping their sales strategies. (* Disclosure below.)

In the back door and through the C-suite

Veeam and NetApp have integrated deeply so users can have the two technologies jointly follow their data around wherever it goes on the long, strange trip through hybrid cloud. Veeam has a reputation as a younger man’s technology that comes in the door through advocates in the IT department. It’s now making a push into larger enterprises, where NetApp has a large, deeply ingrained footprint.
“That’s a big impetus for the partnership, because NetApp has a lot of strength, especially with the ONTAP system in enterprise,” Ringdahl said.
The companies complement each other and fill in their blank spaces. “Veeam is bringing NetApp into more of our commercial deals; Netapp is bringing us into more enterprise deals,” Ringdahl explained. “We can come bottom-up; NetApp can come top-down.”
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the NetApp Insight event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for NetApp Insight. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
[embedded content]

Photo: SiliconANGLE

Since you’re here …

… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.
The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.

Four years ago, Veeam delivered to the market ground-breaking native snapshot integration into NetApp’s flagship ONTAP storage operating system. In addition to operational simplicity, improved efficiencies, reduced risk and increased ROI, the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform and ONTAP continues to help customers of all sizes accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives and compete more effectively in the digital economy.
Today I’m pleased to announce a native storage integration with Element Software, the storage operating system that powers NetApp HCI and SolidFire, is coming to Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 with the upcoming Update 4.Key milestones in the Veeam + NetApp Alliance
Veeam continues to deliver deeper integration across the NetApp Data Fabric portfolio to provide our joint customers with the ability to attain the highest levels of application performance, efficiency, agility and Hyper-Availability across hybrid cloud environments. Together with NetApp, we enable organizations to attain the best RPOs and RTOs for all applications and data through native snapshot based integrations.

How Veeam integration takes NetApp HCI to Hyper-Available

With Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 3, we released a brand-new framework called the “Universal Storage API.” This set of API’s allows Veeam to accelerate the adoption of storage-based integrations to help decrease impact on the production environment, significantly improve RPOs and deliver significant operational benefits that would not be attainable without Veeam.
Let’s talk about how the new Veeam integration with NetApp HCI and SolidFire deliver these benefits.

Backup from Element Storage Snapshots

The Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshot technology is designed to dramatically reduce the performance impact typically associated with traditional API driven VMware backup on primary hypervisor infrastructure.
This process dramatically improves backup performance, with the added benefit of reducing performance impact on production VMware infrastructure.

Granular application item recovery from Element Storage Snapshots

If you’re a veteran of enterprise storage systems and VMware, you undoubtably know the pain of trying to recover individual Windows or Linux files, or application items from a Storage Snapshot. The good news is that Veeam makes this process fast, easy and painless. With our new integration into Element snapshots, you can quickly recover application items directly from the Storage Snapshot like:

Individual Windows or Linux guest files

Exchange items

MS SQL databases

Oracle databases

Microsoft Active Directory items

Microsoft SharePoint items

What’s great about this functionality is that it works with a Storage Snapshot created by Veeam and NetApp, and the only requirement is that VMs need to be in the VMDK format.

Hyper-Available VMs with Instant VM Recovery from Element Snapshots

Everyone knows that time is money and that every second that a critical workload is offline your business is losing money, prestige and possibly even customers. What if I told you that you could recover an entire virtual machine, no matter the size in a very short timeframe? Sound farfetched? Instant VM Recovery technology from Veeam which leverages Element Snapshots for NetApp HCI and SolidFire makes this a reality.
Not only is this process extremely fast, there is no performance loss during this process, because once recovered, the VM is running from your primary production storage system!Veeam Instant VM Recovery on NetApp HCI

Element Snapshot orchestration for better RPO

It’s common to see a nightly or twice daily backup schedule in most organizations. The problem with this strategy is that it leaves your organization with a large data loss potential of 12-24 hours. We call the amount of acceptable data loss your “RPO” or recovery point objective. Getting your RPO as low as possible just makes good business sense. With Veeam and Element Snapshot management, we can supplement the off-array backup schedule with more frequent storage array-based snapshots. One common example would be taking hourly storage-based snapshots in between nightly off-array Veeam backups. When a restore event happens, you now have hourly snapshots, or a Veeam backup to choose from when executing the recovery operation.

Put your Storage Snapshots to work with Veeam DataLabs

Wouldn’t it be great if there were more ways to leverage your investments in Storage Snapshots for additional business value? Enter Veeam DataLabs — the easy way to create copies of your production VMs in a virtual lab protected from the production network by a Veeam network proxy.
The big idea behind this technology is to provide your business with near real-time copies of your production VMs for operations like dev/test, data analytics, proactive DR testing for compliance, troubleshooting, sandbox testing, employee training, penetration testing and much more! Veeam makes the process of test lab rollouts and refreshes easy and automated.

NetApp + Veeam = Better Together

NetApp Storage Technology and Veeam Availability Suite are perfectly matched to create a Hyper-Available data center. Element storage integrations provide fast, efficient backup capabilities, while significantly lowering RPOs and RTOs for your organization.Find out more on how you can simplify IT, reduce risk, enhance operational efficiencies and increase ROI through NetApp HCI and Veeam.GD Star Ratingloading…Native snapshot integration for NetApp HCI and SolidFire, 4.9 out of 5 based on 15 ratings

With the infrastructure world in constant flux, more and more businesses are adopting a multi-cloud deployment model. The challenges from this are becoming more complex and, in some cases, cumbersome. Consider the impact on the data alone. 10 years ago, all anyone worried about was if the SAN would stay up, and if it didn’t, would their data be protected. Fast forward to today, even a small business can have data scattered across the globe. Maybe they have a few vSphere hosts in an HQ, with branch offices using workloads running in the cloud or Software as a Service-based applications. Maybe backups are stored in an object storage repository (somewhere — but only one guy knows where). This is happening in the smallest of businesses, so as a business grows and scales, the challenges become even more complex.

Potential pitfalls

Now this blog is not about how Veeam manages data in a multi-cloud world, it’s more about how to understand the challenges and the potential pitfalls. Take a look at the diagram below:

Veeam supports a number of public clouds and different platforms. This is a typical scenario in a modern business. Picture the scene: workloads are running on top of a hypervisor like VMware vSphere or Nutanix, with some services running in AWS. The company is leveraging Microsoft Office 365 for its email services (people rarely build Exchange environments anymore) with Active Directory extended into Azure. Throw in some SAP or Oracle workloads, and your data management solution has just gone from “I back up my SAN every night to tape” to “where is my data now, and how do I restore it in the event of a failure?” If worrying about business continuity didn’t keep you awake 10 years ago, it surely does now. This is the impact of modern life. The more agility we provide on the front end for an IT consumer, the more complexity there has to be on the back end.
With the ever-growing complexity, global reach and scale of public clouds, as well as a more hands-off approach from IT admins, this is a real challenge to protect a business, not only from an outage, but from a full-scale business failure.

Managing a multi-cloud environment

When looking to manage a multi-cloud environment, it is important to understand these complexities, and how to avoid costly mistakes. The simplistic approach to any environment, whether it is running on premises or in the cloud, is to consider all the options. Sounds obvious, but that has not always been the case. Where or how you deploy a workload is becoming irrelevant, but how you protect that workload still is. Think about the public cloud: if you deploy a virtual machine, and set the firewall ports to any:any, (that would never happen would it?), you can be pretty sure someone will gain access to that virtual machine at some point. Making sure that workload is protected and recoverable is critical in this instance. The same considerations and requirements always apply whether running on premises or off premises. How do you protect the data and how do you recover the data in the event of a failure or security breach?

Why use a cloud platform?

This is something often overlooked, but it has become clear in recent years that organizations do not choose a cloud platform for single, specific reasons like cost savings, higher performance and quicker service times, but rather because the cloud is the right platform for a specific application. Sure, individual reason benefits may come into play, but you should always question the “why” on any platform selection.
When you’re looking at data management platforms, consider not only what your environment looks like today, but also what will it look like tomorrow. Does the platform you’re purchasing today have a roadmap for the future? If you can see that the company has a clear vision and understanding of what is happening in the industry, then you can feel safe trusting that platform to manage your data anywhere in the world, on any platform. If a roadmap is not forthcoming, or they just don’t get the vision you are sharing about your own environment, perhaps it’s time to look at other vendors. It’s definitely something to think about next time you’re choosing a data management solution or platform.
The post Considerations in a multi-cloud world appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

October 26th, 2018 by Michael Rink

Veeam announced that Update 4 of Veeam Backup & Replication, expected later this year, will add native storage integration with Element Software,the storage operating system that powers NetApp HCI and SolidFire. Veeam first joined NetApp’s Alliance program four years ago, in 2014. Since then they’ve been steadily increasing support and integration. Earlier this month the two companies worked together to allow NetApp to resale Veaam Availability Solutions.
Veeam’s integration into Element snapshots, once complete, will allow IT engineers to quickly recover application items directly from the Storage Snapshot at a very granular level. Not just entire databases, but also individual Windows or Linux guest files and Exchange items (emails). Veem even expects to be able to recover Microsoft SharePoint items & Microsoft Active Directory items directly from the Storage Snapshot; which will be a pretty neat trick. The only requirement is that VMs need to be in the VMDK format.
With their next update, Veeam is expecting to be able to recover an entire virtual machine, no matter the size in a very short timeframe by leveraging Element Snapshots for NetApp HCI and SolidFire. Once recovered, the VM will be running from the primary production storage system. Additionally, Veeam is offering support for companies that want to leverage their backup snapshots to support testing and development. By quickly cloning the most recent backup of your company’s production environment; Veeam lets you reduce the risk of unexpected integration problems. It’s also useful for troubleshooting (especially those production only problems), sandbox testing, employee training, and penetration testing.VeeamDiscuss this storySign up for the StorageReview newsletter

As Co-CEO and President, I am always looking ahead. How can we improve? Are we delivering the best solutions to meet customer demands? What will be the next transformational opportunity that we can grasp? But I also like to reflect on the past and having just closed our fiscal Q3’18 I am delighted with the state of the business.
We have just closed another record period, our 41st consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Bookings grew by more than 20% year-over-year (YoY), which is traditionally a slower quarter across the software business due to summertime. Our traction in the Enterprise customer segment continues to thrive, increasing by almost 25% compared to Q3’17, and we now count more than 80% of the Fortune 500 as Veeam customers.
While I am very pleased with these results, what excites me most is the momentum we are making in the Cloud, with our emerging products, and with our ecosystem partners. At VeeamON 2018, we unveiled our vision and strategy to be the most trusted provider of Intelligent Data Management solutions in today’s multi-cloud world. We have worked tirelessly to deliver on this vision and we are seeing the rewards; in Q3’18 our cloud business grew by 26% YoY.
A great example of customers embracing Veeam’s approach to data management across multi-cloud environments is Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365® Version 2, which we launched in July. We enabled customers and Veeam Cloud and Service Providers (VCSPs) to seamlessly protect their entire Microsoft Office 365 environments and ensure data availability, and we have seen this business soar – bookings are up more than 700% YoY! In addition, our AWS cloud backup product, N2WS continues to be #1 in AWS backup and recovery with growth over 186% in Q3 YoY.
But that’s not all. Perhaps our biggest achievement over the past quarter has been the momentum we’ve built with our ecosystem partners. As you know, Veeam has always been – and always will be – a company that is focused on partnerships. Our 59,000 ProPartners know this.
Over the past 18 months we have strengthened our focus with Alliance partners, with Q3’18 growth accelerating exponentially. During the quarter, we announced Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV. We also expanded collaboration with Cisco to deliver Veeam High Availability on Cisco HyperFlex™ and added our fourth resale partner, Lenovo, to the reseller relationships we have with HPE, Cisco and NetApp.
The result? We grew our Alliances business by 128% YoY. This is a tremendous achievement and I want to personally thank each of our partners for their continued support and engagement. Partners are flocking to Veeam as their preferred data management partner as they know that we can deliver a proposition that meets customers’ demands today and into the future.
It’s been another strong quarter for Veeam and its ecosystem. I want to congratulate all involved. However, as much as I applaud the past, I am always looking forward. Everyone at Veeam, its partners and the 320,000 customers that rely on us to protect their environments, are looking to closing the year strong. The opportunity in front of us is huge, and I know that 2018 will go on record as Veeam’s best ever.
To all, thanks for your continued support.Show more articles from this author

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

Having been hands-on in service provider land for the entirety of my career prior to joining Veeam, I understand the pain points that come with offering backup and recovery services. I’ve spent countless hours working on getting the best combination of hardware and software for those services. I also know firsthand the challenges that storage platforms pose for architecture, engineering and operations teams who design, implement and manage these platforms.

Storage scalability

An immutable truth that exists in our world is that backup and storage go hand in hand and you can’t have one without the other. In recent times, there has been an extreme growth in the amount of data being backed up and the sprawl of that data has also become increasingly challenging to manage. While data is growing quicker than it ever has, in relative terms the issues created by that haven’t changed in the last ten or so years — though they have been magnified.
Focusing on storage, those that have deployed any storage platform understand that there will come a point where hardware and software constraints start to come into play. I’ve not yet experienced or heard of a storage system that doesn’t apply some limitation on scale or performance at some point. Whether you are constrained by physical disk or controller based limits or software overheads, the reality is no system is infinitely scalable and free of challenge.
The immediate solution to resolve these challenges in my experience (and anecdotally) has always been to throw more hardware at the platforms by purchasing more. Whether it be performance or disk constraints, the end result is always to expand capacity or upgrade the core hardware components to get the system back to a point where it’s performing as expected.
That said, there are a number of systems that do work well, and if architected and managed in the correct way will offer longer term service sustainability. When it comes to designing storage for backup data, the principals that are used to design for other workloads such as virtual machines cannot be applied. Backup data is a long game and portability of that data should be paramount when choosing what storage to use.

How Veeam helps

Veeam offers tights integration with a number of top storage vendors via our storage integrations. Not only do these integrations offer flexibility to our customers and partners, but they also offer absolute choice and mobility when it comes to the short and long-term retention of backup data.
Extending that portability message — the way in which backup data is stored should mean that when storage systems reach the end of their lifetime, data isn’t held a prisoner to the hardware. Another inevitability of storage is that there will come a time when it needs replacing. This is where Veeam’s hardware agnostic, software-defined approach to backup comes into play.
Recently, there have been a number of products that have come into the market that offer an all-in-one solution for data protection in the form of software tied to hardware appliances. The premise of these offerings is ease of use and single platform to manage. While it’s true that all-in-one solutions are attractive, there is a sting in the tail of any platform that offers software that is tied to hardware.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, the issues that apply to storage platforms apply to these all-in-one appliances. They will reach a point where performance starts to struggle, upgrades are required and, ultimately, systems need to be replaced. This is where the ability to have freedom of choice and a decoupled approach to software and hardware ultimately results in total control of where your backup data is stored, how it performs and when that data is required to be moved or migrated.
You only achieve this through backup software that’s separated from the hardware. While it might seem like a panacea to have an all-in-one solution, there needs to be consideration as to what this means three, five or ten years into the future. Again, portability and choice is king when it comes to choosing a backup vendor. Lock in should be avoided at all costs.GD Star Ratingloading…Why our software-driven, hardware agnostic approach makes sense for backups, 3.9 out of 5 based on 7 ratings

Veeam, a company born on virtualization, has rapidly adapted to customer needs to become the leader in Intelligent Data Management. In keeping with its speed and momentum to market, Veeam’s highly anticipated NEW Veeam Availability Suite Update 4 will be released in Q4 2018. This promises to redefine cloud data management with cloud mobility for Microsoft Azure Stack, as well as native Azure Blob storage for Veeam-powered archives.

Take a deeper look at the current and new innovations Veeam will showcase at Microsoft Ignite 2018:

Enabling cloud backup to Azure — automatically sending backups to the cloud (for both service providers and enterprise customers)

NEW – 10x the savings on archiving in Azure Blob with Veeam Cloud Archive

NEW – 2 steps to restore ANY backup to Azure and Azure Stack, including both physical and virtual machine backups.

2 steps to restore ANY backup to Azure and Azure Stack

As you probably know, Microsoft Azure Stack is an exciting innovation that extends the power of the Azure public cloud to on-premises. Building on Veeam’s announcement at Microsoft Ignite 2017, Veeam is publicly presenting Veeam Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure Stack. With similar functionality to existing Veeam Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure, this new mobility feature for Azure Stack allows you to restore and migrate workloads from on-premises to Azure Stack, or even from Microsoft Azure to Azure Stack, all with a 2-step process!

This means that in the event of a failure, or if you want to migrate a current VM to Azure Stack, you can quickly achieve this through the built-in Veeam Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure Stack functionality that will be available in the upcoming update.

10x the savings with native cloud archive capabilities for Azure Blob

Another big highlight at Ignite is Veeam’s highly anticipated, native Azure Blob support known as Veeam Cloud Archive. This will give customers an automated data-management solution designed to simplify data transfer to Azure Blob storage, with up to 10x the savings on long-term archives.

With this upcoming feature, it has never been easier to free up primary storage space and save on costs by archiving your Veeam backups offsite with infinite scalability into Azure Blob. By leveraging Veeam’s proven Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR) technologies, customers can access the cloud directly for storage of long-term data archives. Also, unlike other solutions, Veeam does not charge storage tax fees for storing data in the cloud — making this one of the most cost-effective cloud archive solutions in the industry!

Summary

There’s a lot of buzz at Microsoft Ignite around Veeam’s new cloud management capabilities for Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack coming in NEW Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4. As the Leader in Intelligent Data Management for the Hyper-Available Enterprise, Veeam continues to deliver innovative solutions — with cloud mobility for Microsoft Azure Stack and native cloud archives for Azure Blob.

I recently had a chance to talk with Rick Vanover of Veeam Software about what businesses need to do these days to ensure their availability strategy fully addresses their needs. Rick is the director of product strategy at Veeam, where he leads a team of technologists and analysts that brings Veeam solutions to market and works with customers, partners, and R&D teams around the world. You can follow Rick on Twitter @RickVanover.

MITCH: Rick, thanks very much for agreeing to let me interview you on the topic of how data protection and availability are changing in our cloud-based area and what organizations are doing right and wrong these days when it comes to preparing for disaster recovery.

Rick Vanover (Credit: Veeam Software)

RICK: My pleasure. This is an area that I’ve built my career around and organizations today need to ensure that their availability strategy meets the expectations of the business.

MITCH: The last few years have seen a lot of changes in how organizations of all sizes implement and manage their IT infrastructures. Cloud computing models like software as a service (SaaS) now enables users to connect to and use cloud-based apps directly over the Internet with Microsoft’s Office 365 being one popular solution of this type. Then there’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that lets organizations build agile computing infrastructures that can scale up and down on demand. What does and doesn’t change in regards to ensuring data protection and availability for your business with these new models?

RICK: This is a great question, Mitch, and I’m glad you asked it. The one important thing I’ve learned over the years is that while the platform may change, the rules on the data and availability expectations do not change. Microsoft Office 365 is a good example that you have illustrated. The promise of this Software as a Service (SaaS) solution is great: a great relief of on-premises tier 1 storage, the opportunity to reduce the need for mailbox quotas and with OneDrive for Business a way to combat “shadow IT” file sharing outside of corporate mechanisms. These are real business problems solved by Microsoft Office 365 and these changes are welcome to both users and IT administrators alike.

But what doesn’t change when the application does change? The responsibility of the data. Organizations need to realize that this is their data and Veeam has invested in a new product, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

MITCH: What sort of changes do organizations need to make in their supporting processes to ensure data protection/availability in the event of a disaster when they’ve embraced the cloud wholeheartedly or at least adopted some sort of hybrid IT model?

RICK: As the mix of platforms change for organizations, the disaster recovery aspect absolutely needs to be reassessed. This is a very difficult task and, honestly, the old way of doing this isn’t acceptable anymore today. I know plenty of IT administrators who addressed disaster recovery as a once-a-year test where there was free pizza over the weekend, things were tested, about half of it failed, and the goal was to do better next year. Today’s IT services and expectations can’t deal with that.

I know plenty of IT administrators who addressed disaster recovery as a once-a-year test where there was free pizza over the weekend, things were tested, about half of it failed, and the goal was to do better next year. Today’s IT services and expectations can’t deal with that.

This is one reason Veeam have developed a new product that went available earlier this year, Veeam Availability Orchestrator. This product brings a very critical capability for disaster recovery in the era of hybrid IT. Veeam Availability Orchestrator supports orchestrating disaster recovery for on-premises workloads; but also supports orchestrated disaster recovery to VMware Cloud on AWS. This is a new cloud offering in Amazon for VMware workloads. This is an example where an organization can have their on-premises resources benefit from DR in the cloud — literally!

MITCH: I’ve heard it said by some who provide IT support for businesses that rely mostly on SaaS applications that “backup” is basically a bad word now, that performing daily backups is a dead practice because there are now more sophisticated ways to ensure availability for your business data. But this sounds a lot like an oversimplification to me. Does the availability burden of performing regular backups really go away with cloud computing?

RICK: Backup is the first stage. Veeam takes a critical view on this step. In fact, backup is the most important stage. We see the market as a five-stage journey to intelligent data management:

Backup and recovery, as well as replication and failover, are the important critical functions there. This effectively is a gateway to more advanced capabilities.

The next step is an aggregation of those critical data sources, whether they are in the cloud, on-premises, or in the SaaS space. Having the data flow for all critical data is an important milestone, and each platform has their own characteristics that may change what the capabilities are for backup and recovery.

With the aggregation of this data, visibility becomes important. Answering key questions like what data is where, who is accessing what, will the environment run out of storage and such are very critical questions today.

Advanced capabilities become the next opportunity, and orchestration is a capability that Veeam brings today to the market that can respond to changes very easily. For example, orchestrated disaster recovery to another site can be done with confidence if there is a concern that weather is going to take out a data center, so organizations can proactively fail overconfidently.

With all of these capabilities, then automation becomes the goal. Automatic resolution of issues and policy violations, for example, will be a capability from Veeam later this year. This can be very important when it comes to ensuring that critical data is protected to the level the business demands today.

This is a quick overview of our vision, but it is important to reinforce that it all starts with a solid backup and recovery as well as replication and failover capability.

MITCH: Given all these changes that are happening, what are most organizations doing right and wrong these days with regard to disaster recovery?

RICK: My observation today is that many organizations are simply not providing the availability experience their business demands. The best example is a high-speed recovery technique. Ask this question: If someone accidentally deletes a virtual machine, how soon can it come back? If the answer is more than a few minutes, there is a gap between capabilities of what is in place and the expectation of users. That’s one example that Veeam has pioneered and led the market for over eight years and there are move. Same for an AWS EC2 instance in the cloud: If someone terminates and deletes it, how soon can it come back? If that too is more than minutes, there is a gap.

Organizations are doing things right when it comes to leveraging new platforms. This includes leveraging SaaS applications where it makes sense, leveraging the cloud and leveraging service providers for the right services as well.

The key advice I have to offer is to ensure that availability is thought of every step of the way.

MITCH: How do new platforms like hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), advanced storage systems, and robust networking change the game in regards to availability?

RICK: They provide new “plumbing” to work with. New APIs, new networking techniques, and better snapshot capabilities. These are all important for efficient data flow for backup and recovery as well as replication and failover.

Veeam has always invested in APIs and platform capabilities to address data movement at scale. The new technology platforms in the mix are built in the same mindset as well.

MITCH: Looking ahead then, what do you see in the future for business continuity and disaster recovery?

RICK: I see a continued push for completeness. Organizations will make changes to applications, data, and other critical systems to make them more “DR friendly.” A good example is a legacy application that sits on a physical server that is obsolete on an operating system out of support for three years. Can that application really have good DR? No.

The key advice I have to offer is to ensure that availability is thought of every step of the way.

Organizations are indeed seeing the value of proper DR and if the application needs modernized, changed, or sunset out of production use, that’s what it takes.

Proper DR comes with modern platforms and data; obsolete components can’t be made awesome!

MITCH: What practical advice would you give to an admin for implementing disaster recovery solutions in a hybrid cloud environment? Any tips or recommendations to help them get it right going forward?

RICK: If there is a gap in the availability strategy, my advice is to start small and make it right. Specifically, that would mean take one small application. Get the basics of backup and recovery right. Then set up replication and DR capabilities for that small application. Once you have that working right, that motion educates organizations about what solid backup looks like. How those types of tools work, etc.

Then move to the next application that is a bit more complex. And succeed. Get applications to the right model one at a time. Don’t start with the biggest, most critical application in the mix at first.

Once the small successes are proven, go back to the business (like operational people in an organization) and indicate that proper DR and better backup and restore times can be achieved if we virtualize this application or invest in a storage snapshot engine or such.

If the business is drawn to the benefits, the effort to change the platform may come much easier.

MITCH: Rick, thanks very much for giving us some of your valuable time!

To meet the rising demands of IT infrastructures, businesses of all sizes, from SMB to the largest enterprises, are embracing the cloud. But a one-cloud-fits-all strategy is not the norm.
By evaluating workloads across an IT environment and assessing requirements like performance, infrastructure compatibility, security and compliance, and strategic fit, businesses are choosing a mix of cloud deployment models to maximize the benefits of cloud across private, public, and hybrid environments.
For many small to midsized businesses, they are turning to a cloud-first strategy, often abandoning completely the need for an on-premises data center. Enterprises are taking a multi-provider approach to the cloud to drive innovation. And all sizes of businesses are looking at a hybrid model that has data residing in a hybrid environment. The end result is a multi-cloud strategy. In fact, based on recent studies, 81% of enterprises are embracing a multi-cloud strategy with a mix of solutions across private, public, and hybrid cloud — across multiple providers.[1]
Now the challenge becomes: how to ensure data and apps are always available across this multi-cloud model so that you never skip a beat when it comes to innovating and providing services to your customers.
We know this can be a challenge as:

66 % of enterprises admit that digital transformation initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime [2]

$21.8M is an average financial cost of Availability and Protection Gaps for the enterprise [3]

60% of U.S. businesses that experience a cyber-attack suffer the consequence of data loss [4]

Veeam understands the opportunities and implications of a multi-cloud environment and has built an entire cloud strategy around protecting customers’ data, whether it is on premises, in a hybrid model, or residing in the cloud.
Our relationship with multiple cloud providers ensures our customers can choose a cloud vendor and be assured Veeam will be there to protect the data.
A perfect example of this relationship is the strength of the partnership between Microsoft Cloud and Veeam. When Mark Russinovich, CTO for Microsoft Azure, spoke onstage at VeeamON 2017, he clearly laid out that Veeam is a trusted partner for Microsoft.
Alasdair Thomson, IT Director College Success Foundation, says:“When you use Veeam, it’s less about where data sits and more about visibility, access and control. That’s why we love Veeam — we can ensure availability of data on-premises and in Microsoft’s cloud. Combining Microsoft and Veeam is a win-win all around.”
While the cloud has continued to expand into every business of every size, there are still challenges for IT departments.
To overcome these challenges, here are three key cloud Availability best practices to consider:

Leverage the cloud for backup and disaster recovery of your on-premises data: With any Availability strategy, it’s important to take a 3-2-1 approach, meaning that there are at least 3 copies of your data, 2 of which are local but on different mediums, and at least 1 offsite copy. With a multi-cloud strategy, you are in an ideal position to take advantage of the cloud to help execute a 3-2-1 approach and optimize any legacy backup systems with the cloud. As an example, with Veeam, you can leverage any public cloud provider, including Microsoft Azure, AWS, and IBM Cloud or a managed service provider to protect your data offsite. You can also leverage the cloud for disaster recovery by replicating your data to the cloud to meet your RTO and RPO requirements.

Protect your data that’s already in the cloud, whether it’s in an IaaS or SaaS solution: It’s your data, you own it, you control it… and you need to protect it. Take email data retention as an example. Organizations across industries face regulations that require email to be retained for up to 7 years. For highly regulated industries, like the financial services sector, retention periods can go up to a lifetime.[5] If you’re using an email SaaS solution, like Microsoft Office 365, it is critical that you protect the data in the event of an accidental deletion, outage, or malicious attack. You can do this by using an Availability solution like Veeam that copies your data to another location – whether on-premises or to a different cloud data center.

Replicate and migrate applications and data within your cloud: In a multi-cloud strategy, you’re likely to have “born in the cloud” applications in your environment. In this case, replicating these applications for data protection and recovery will be critical to ensure these apps stay up and running in the event of un-expected downtime. To give you an example, you may currently run your cloud-based app in an IBM Cloud data center located in Houston, Texas. With Veeam, you can easily replicate and migrate this app to any of the 50+ IBM Cloud data centers around the world, whether that’s Dallas, São Paulo, Milan, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hong Kong, or to any data center within your cloud to meet your data protection and migration needs.[6]

With these proven approaches to providing Availability across your multi-cloud environment, you can confidently accelerate innovation without worrying about disruption to your business. To get started with an Availability strategy for your multi-cloud environment, visit veeam.com to check out our solutions.

Cisco and Veeam – A Validated SolutionCIOCisco and Veeam – A Validated Solution. Veeam Availability Suite for Cisco UCS and HyperFlex is a validated solution that is more than just backup and recovery. Email a friend. To. Use commas to separate multiple email addresses. From. Privacy Policy …

The recent introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has done a lot to tackle issues surrounding business’ exploitation of personal data and has led to calls by some tech leaders for a similar legislative approach in the U.S. at a Federal Government level. Just last month, “The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018” was created, promising similar rights for the State’s 40 million citizens as Europeans received with GDPR.
The hastily approved Act, which is due to come into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, affords citizens the right to see what information of theirs is being collected by businesses and to request that data be deleted. They will also be able to find out whether their information is being sold to third parties, including advertisers, and to request they stop doing so. It is by some stretch the most comprehensive privacy law in the country, but it’s not without fault.
California is known across the world for Silicon Valley and the endless amounts of world-changing technology businesses it has given birth to. The irony is the businesses that call the state home are precisely those causing the need for such regulatory overhaul by pushing the boundaries on technology, and as a result, privacy.
California has a long history of taking privacy seriously and has led the United States in terms of the creation of privacy laws. In 1972, Golden State voters amended the California Constitution to include the right of privacy among the “inalienable” rights of all people, and in doing so gave every Californian a legal and enforceable right of privacy. Since then, more laws have been passed to safeguard state citizens, including the Online Privacy Protection Act, the Privacy Rights for California Minors in the Digital World Act, and Shine the Light.
While GDPR was accused of being ambiguous for its lack of specificity, it looks comprehensive in comparison to the California Consumer Privacy Act. Its very creation was to curb the abusive practices of online businesses trading consumer data for financial income. Unfortunately, through some loose categorization of businesses, the Act has the potential to include websites that collect IP addresses of sites with over 137 unique visitors per day. That is just one example, but there are plenty more. And it matters.
In 2017, over 1.7 billion files were leaked through breaches. After the California Consumer Privacy Act comes into force, organizations mishandling data could be penalized up to $7,500 for each violation, which could add up significantly based on the 2017 data. If you look specifically at data breach penalties across the different states, they vary significantly; Texas imposes civil fines of up to $50,000 per violation while Georgia imposes no penalty at all. For me, this is where the problem lies.
If each state takes a local approach to data privacy, the United States will become a patchwork of regulation, and unless state laws can come to a common agreement, it might soon become a challenging and less friendly place to do business. That’s not a good thing for anyone.
A discussion draft of a new proposed federal law, “Data Acquisition and Technology Accountability and Security Act,” would pre-empt state breach notification laws, but has received widespread criticism. It isn’t perfect. It’s too focused on notification itself rather than providing consumers with the rights needed for modern, everyday lives. But if it could be adjusted and expanded, it would be a better way of handling state-wide data privacy concerns and data management practices.
What would be preferable is if the law could mirror the GDPR, a very thorough and active piece of regulation. The hard work for legislators is largely done, and it would reduce the compliance costs for American businesses and encourage a fast start. Given we’re now on the backfoot and in desperate need of such a law, common sense says use something global businesses are already working with, rather than the laws 50 states independently create.
California has made the first move, but is it the right one? I’d be keen to hear your views on this.Show more articles from this author

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

Veeam is expanding its partnership with Lenovo to make its hyper-availability solutions available right from Lenovo and its resellers.
As a part of the partnership, Veeam intelligent data management solutions will be available with Lenovo Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) and Storage Area Network (SAN) offerings.
The customers will be able to purchase the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform directly from Lenovo and its resellers in a single transaction.
The aim of this partnership is to provide seamless and efficient sales and deployment process to partners and customers. Integration of Lenovo SDI and SAN solutions with Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform will help enterprises simplify IT, mitigate risks, and accelerate their business with intelligent data management solutions.“Lenovo’s decision to resell Veeam Intelligent Data Management and Availability solutions with their offerings reflects Veeam’s market momentum and leadership,” said Peter McKay, President and Co-CEO of Veeam.“It’s a prime example of two technology leaders collaborating to provide the most seamless and efficient sales and deployment process for its partners and customers. Lenovo’s global reach and extensive partner ecosystem, combined with the strong growth of its Data Center Infrastructure (DCI) and Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) business units, provides Veeam customers with the best purchasing experience.”
The combined solution will reduce the costs and complexity of traditional infrastructure, virtualization, and data protection management. The companies said that they together aim to provide enterprises an increased ROI, accelerate application development and deployment, support data analytics, and simplify disaster recovery.
Veeam solutions come integrated with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix Acropolis. It will help enterprises automate backup and recovery operations for high availability of data and applications.“Veeam’s strong track record of innovation combined with their focus on creating a great user experience aligns with our customer-first approach. This alliance further enables us to provide an effortless customer experience and relevant solutions to our customers,” said John Majeski, who leads the Software and Solutions business at Lenovo Data Center Group.“Businesses want solutions that provide IT simplicity while delivering Intelligent Transformation across environments. Veeam Availability Solutions deliver the IT simplicity and Intelligent Data Management needed for Lenovo Spectrum Virtualize SAN solutions, as well as for Lenovo’s SDI portfolio of ThinkAgile offerings with VMware, Microsoft and Nutanix to accelerate digital transformation while mitigating business risk.”
Additionally, organizations will also be able to create Veeam DataLabs environments for accelerated app development and testing, efficient DR testing for corporate data governance and compliance, and data analytics for improved business intelligence.Also read: How Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform on Cisco HyperFlex helps enterprises modernize their data centers?“The multi-cloud capabilities of Veeam combined with Lenovo’s extensive portfolio of hybrid cloud solutions, provides organizations with the unprecedented choice, flexibility and agility needed to stay competitive in the digital economy,” said Carey Stanton, Vice President of Global Alliances at Veeam.“This partnership is yet another example of how Veeam is helping customers ensure availability across all clouds without compromising availability, performance, efficiency or manageability.”

I guess I should have called this how to be successful with BCDR but I really wanted to tie this to VAO. I have heard of people saying VAO just works. It doesn’t quite mind you. It is a BCDR tool so it is only – at best – 15% of a BCDR project. The rest is the investigation and learning you need to do to make it possible to have a successful BCDR project. So you investigate, search, discuss, talk, decide and then you have the info you need to start making VAO useful. We are going to look at what you need to think about and look into to be successful at the at the investigation and research.
The Business Impact Assessment (BIA) is the quick way to making VAO work successfully due to the fact it contains so much useful information. But not everyone will have a BIA or time or money to do one. But if you have one, make sure it is current, and it will have all of the info to make VAO work real good!
So you do it manual – which I call an application catalog.
You need to fill in the form below.

short form, Name of app, business contact, technical contact, data, comments, components of the app, misc info, RTO, importance

Example
Exchange, v2016. www.microsoft.com, AppOwner – John Smith, Lead Support – Jane Doe, 24 VMs, requires – AD / DNS / DHCP, 1 desktop, minimum of 8 of the VMs, and DC with global catalog role, Barracuda Anti-Spam appliance, physical requirements – Barracuda Anti-Spam appliance. Miscellaneous notes – spare Barracuda appliance on DR site, and virtual is possible. RTO – 2 hours. Importance – 1.
Sometimes you can work with the Help Desk – if you have one, as it often has a basic form of this kind of doc, and you can improve it. The components is the hard part, often it is Active Directory for credentials, DNS for directory services, but it can be things like database servers, or anti spam appliances for example.
Now you have an application catalog, you need to talk to your management to understand the priority of each app. Hopefully you will select email to be the first recovered.
The important apps should be packaged on their own – Email, SharePoint, Accts Payable, Accts Rec, SQL for example. The less important apps can be bundled together and protected together. But often in DR the outage is only partial so you may only fail over email for example and so packaging with that granularity is important.
Now that you have an application catalog you can start using the info in it to do your VAO build-out of plans and start doing your test failover.
If you got all your info right in the catalog, you should have successful test failover. But if you don’t check out the info in the execution report and it will likely have what you need to modify and try again.
In the case of VAO, it has functionality other DR tools sometimes doesn’t have and that is the ability to add scripts to do really good automated tests. So that is worth doing – so for you own apps do some scripting and use the info in this article and this one to get them into and working with VAO.
I like to document my recovery plan using info from the application catalog so I am ready to work in VAO, but have handy what is necessary. Here is an example.
I hope this information gives you some help and guidance so when you sit down with VAO you are going to be more quickly successful with it.
BTW, using VAO is not hard. But it is hard knowing all the info you need to know to be successful with it. So that is what I am trying to help with in this article.
Let me know if you have questions or comments.
Michael
=== END ===

Exclusive: Veeam’s best practices for availability in a cloud era – ChannelLife NZ

veeam – Google News

Article by Veeam product strategy VP Danny AllanThe new digital economy has brought about many changes, forcing businesses and their IT infrastructure to react in new ways to meet new demands.When it comes to the cloud, the changes are just as dynamic.Research has found that 81% of enterprises are embracing a multi-cloud strategy with a mix of solutions across private, public, and hybrid clouds – across multiple providers.With this big move to multi-cloud, the next question is How can businesses ensure their apps and data are available across the new multi-cloud models they are adopting?Before that question is addressed, here are some stats highlighting the downside of low availability:

66 % of enterprises admit that digital transformation initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime

$21.8M is an average financial cost of availability and protection gaps for the enterprise

60% of U.S. businesses that experience a cyber-attack suffer the consequence of data loss

Fortunately, there are some measures businesses can take to ensure optimal availability.

Here are three key multi-cloud availability best practices to consider:

1. Leverage the cloud for backup and disaster recovery of on-premises data

A good start for any availability strategy is to make sure to follow the 3-2-1 Rule, which is to have at least three copies of data, two of which are local but on different mediums, and at least one off-site copy. Businesses with a multi-cloud strategy are in an ideal position to take advantage of the cloud to help execute a 3-2-1 approach and optimise any legacy backup systems with the cloud.

2. Protect data that’s already in the cloud

It’s important to have control and protection over data already deployed in the cloud. Email data, for instance, is something many organisations must retain for extended periods of time for compliance and regulatory needs. Whether an organisation is using a SaaS solution, such as Microsoft Office 365, or hosting their email application on IaaS, it is critical to have protection against accidental deletions, outages, or a malicious attack.

3. Replicate and migrate applications and data within the cloud

In a multi-cloud strategy, a company will most likely have “born in the cloud” applications in their environment. Being able to replicate these applications for data protection and recovery will be critical to making sure these apps stay up and running in the event of unexpected downtime.For instance, a company may currently run their cloud-based app in the IBM Cloud data centre located in Houston, Texas.It can replicate and migrate this app to any of the more than 50 IBM Cloud data centres around the world, or to any data centre within its cloud to meet its data protection and migration needs.With the momentum to multi-cloud adoption in full swing, having an availability strategy and plan is more important than ever.

Cisco and Veeam have created what they are calling a “game-changer” in the hyper-converged infrastructure market by infusing Veeam’s data management platform into Cisco’s flagship HyperFlex platform.

“It’s going to be a game-changer for the industry,” said Peter McKay, co-CEO and president of Veeam, in an interview with CRN at VMworld 2018. “We’re the first and the only intelligent data management solution for Cisco HyperFlex. It’s a tightly integrated the solution [and we’re] going to market together as a joint, one single SKU, that all the Cisco sales organizations, Cisco channel, Veeam channel can take advantage of.”

Veeam will integrate its new, highly resilient data management platform, Veeam High Availability, into Cisco HyperFlex. The vendor’s High Availability solution provides seamless scalability, ease of management and support for multi-cloud environments through Cisco support services, supporting all virtual, physical and cloud workloads.

McKay said Veeam will soon be rolling out channel enablement on the new solution as well as new partner incentive programs to drive sales.

“We’re going to introduce some interesting and exciting new programs to incentivize the channel to really grab it and run with this new offering,” he said.

The new Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex will be offered through Cisco and is backed by Cisco Solution Support, which provides support for the entire solution stack, enabling customers to deploy with confidence and peace of mind. Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex is expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2018.

“The focus for us was really around, ‘How do we make it easier for them to buy. Easier for them to deploy. Easier for them to manage a combined solution. That’s what we really focused on, easier for the customers to manage and run a data management solution,” said McKay. “We think this is a win for our customers. A win for our partners and a win for Cisco and Veeam.”

Cisco chooses Veeam as its first and only Intelligent Data Management partner

Veeam Executive Blog – The Availability Lounge / Peter McKay

“What got you here, won’t get you there” is a saying that’s especially true when it comes to the IT industry. Vendors today need to continually innovate their offerings to keep pace with customer demand. This is more important than ever in the data management industry, and when it comes to innovation, Veeam has always been at the forefront. Today, we are taking this idea one step further.

Cisco has chosen Veeam to deliver a new approach for the Modern Data Center, Veeam Availability Solution on Cisco HyperFlex. This announcement means customers can now run Veeam’s Intelligent Data Management platform on a completely hyperconverged solution, simplifying their deployments and reducing the resources needed to manage them. Cisco HyperFlex provides a platform that delivers seamless scalability, ease of management and multi-cloud support.

Available through Cisco and providing support for the entire solution stack, customers can deploy with confidence and peace of mind. I’m excited Cisco and Veeam both share the goal of helping our customers gain control of their data across all clouds, and that customers can now leverage their existing Cisco procurement relationships. This announcement also makes Veeam the first and only Intelligent Data Management solution to partner with Cisco on HyperFlex as a secondary storage target.

The scale and complexity of managing the hyper-growth and hyper-sprawl of enterprise data today, especially across multi-cloud environments, requires a new type of solution. It requires a solution that moves from traditional, policy-based data management to a more behavior-based system, so data can manage itself more autonomously and deliver critical business and operational insights at record speeds. Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform is the most complete solution to help customers make the transition to Intelligent Data Management, and today’s announcement with Cisco will enable organizations to fully embrace this future.

Our relationship with Cisco has been long and fruitful. Veeam has partnered with Cisco to provide backup for HyperFlex workloads, including snapshot integration for lower RPOs. What sets this announcement apart is that Cisco has been enhanced with Large Form Factor drives, allowing the platform to both run Veeam services, as well as to act as the repository for Veeam backup jobs.

Unreliable technology is causing nearly two-thirds of organizations today to admit they are being held back by unplanned downtime. That’s why our partnership with Cisco continues to thrive. Our joint announcement for Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex is a response to the direct feedback from enterprise customers, partners and service providers.

Organizations have long built their IT architecture on Cisco hardware. Veeam recognizes that investing in a partnership that leverages this underlying platform allows for a level of trust and confidence as Veeam and Cisco work together delivering a superior outcome over legacy vendor solutions that can’t respond to rapidly changing IT environments.

As Veeam is dominating the data management marketplace, we recognize the responsibility of working with our infrastructure partners to provide a simple solution that cuts through the complexity of past industry offerings.

The timing of this announcement is not coincidental. Currently, many legacy companies are feeling the strain of exponential data growth. With data sprawl pushing the need for protection out to the edge of the IT environment, legacy solutions from legacy vendors are struggling to adjust.

Veeam’s explosive growth is due to our focus on the Modern Data Center and its unique needs. Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex is designed to deliver seamless enterprise scalability. This is increasingly important as complexity continues to challenge IT departments. This joint solution reduces overall complexity and effort required to run a data-protection solution. It also provides a single stack, which is pre-validated, assuring customers that Cisco stands behind the solution.

I recognize that every time a customer makes a buying decision with Veeam they are making a choice that goes far beyond the technical. They are making a decision that puts their company and their own careers on the line. I know this, and every person at Veeam knows this. It is something we take seriously. Both Veeam and Cisco are brands that customers and partners can trust.

Developing the leading solution to allow our customers to trust their data is available all the time continues to be our goal.

Veeam Availability Solution on Cisco HyperFlex represents our two companies coming together to meet the demanding needs of you, our customers. We understand this and have worked to simplify the entire process. You can have confidence that we are as concerned with the Availability of your data just as much as you are.

What is the single most important question you can ask your customer? For us, it is how likely they would be to recommend Veeam to a friend or colleague.

Our mission at Veeam is to be the most trusted provider of intelligent data management solutions to meet the expectations of a world that demands the Hyper-Availability of data. Our customers are at the core of our business, and constant feedback is the best way to improve over time.

To help us build trust with our customers, every year we send out a survey that helps us understand how they perceive our products and services. The Customer Satisfaction Survey was conducted by an independent third party, and then used for the Net Promoter Score (NPS) — the index measuring customers’ willingness to recommend a company’s products or services to others.

Veeam’s 2018 Net Promoter Score, 3.5 times the industry average

The respondents were asked how likely they would be to recommend Veeam to a friend or colleague, considering their complete experience with our company. Their answer is a number that is calculated into a score between -100 and +100.

Veeam scored an NPS of 73, which is 3.5 times higher than the industry average (21). This result shows a remarkable appreciation from our customers and places Veeam in the company of some of today’s biggest and most beloved brands: Amazon (61), Netflix (68) and trending toward Apple (89). At a regional level, EMEA’s NPS moved up to 76, being the strongest region in terms of customer satisfaction!

Scoring a high satisfaction level is not a popularity contest, it’s an exam we need to pass, and one where we raise the bar every year. The result of the customer satisfaction survey not only confirms that we put the right efforts and energy in everything we do, but also guides us to areas where we can do better to outperform our competition.

With over 300,000 customers across the globe, it’s essential to understand how satisfied they are about our offerings.

This is a massive achievement for Veeam, and it comes in a key moment — we are on the path to exceed a billion dollars in bookings in 2018. Becoming the next billion-dollar software company is not something you hear every day, and this wouldn’t be possible without our valuable partnerships. Our strong bonds with our alliance partners, Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE, Microsoft, NetApp and VMware, enable Veeam to provide data center transformation, infrastructure modernization and cloud solutions and services to clients worldwide.

For the fifth consecutive year, Veeam has outperformed the industry, scoring 9.0+ for almost all categories, and trust me, this is not getting easier. Technology is developing at a faster pace than ever and so are the expectations of people for their digital lives.

Veeam, born early in the era of the cloud, has created a story of unprecedented success. The story tells of rapid growth, accelerating quarter after quarter, year after year, driven by innovation, product quality, and customer loyalty. 2017 was our best year yet, and this year we continue to grow with tremendous wind in our sails:

Total bookings growth increased throughout 2017, with double-digit growth in every quarter.

Recently, IDC released their market share numbers for 2017, and once again, Veeam leads the pack with more than 26% of overall growth in market share gain. IDC shows that in the last half of 2017 alone, the top three vendors combined lost36% market share while Veeam gained more than 26%. With this growth and success comes a sense of responsibility on our part to help customers see the future and prepare for the change and transformation that is coming.Company Momentum – Top 5 by Company Performance: 2017H2(Vendor Revenue, US Dollar, M)
The question I receive more than any other, is how is it possible for Veeam to continue to generate such growth and success? Especially when one considers we reside in an industry that has a large legacy vendor presence with established, mature products. The answer is multi-faceted, but focuses on three key ingredients:

Built for the Virtual World – Veeam was founded in 2006 to provide systems management solutions for virtualized infrastructures. Veeam quickly became synonymous with data Availability, emerging as the go-to provider for solutions supporting applications and data in cloud-spanning environments. Born in the era of the cloud and built in the era of the cloud.

Partner First Philosophy – In today’s world of rapidly evolving technologies, no company is able to go it alone. Success comes from building and participating in robust technology eco-systems. It is our primary focus to approach every challenge with partnerships, from working with thousands of channel partners, to building deep integration and collaboration with the largest technology vendors in our space.

It Just Works – Veeam has earned a reputation in every sector of the market, including SMB, commercial and enterprise, as a product that delivers on its promises. A product that can be trusted to maintain business continuity in the face of any challenge or disaster. That’s why when customers talk about the reliability of Veeam, they say, “It Just Works.”

Receiving third party validation from IDC helps us continue to tell our story. This isn’t just what we say, but what hundreds of thousands of our customers are saying around the world. In addition, our Net Promoter Score of 73, a number generated by asking companies if they would recommend a technology they have purchased, is 3.5x better than the industry average. When an IT manager chooses an Availability vendor to be there for backup and recovery, they aren’t just choosing a technology. They are betting the future of their company and their own career on that choice. We understand the importance of this decision and take pride in earning that trust. Legacy vendors are struggling to adapt and change in the new environment. Their solutions, built during an era of tape and disk, have failed to keep up with the new demands of data growth and data sprawl. Without the ability to adapt, their customers find themselves vulnerable and looking for a change. Our vision is to be the most trusted provider of Intelligent Data Management solutions, exceeding the expectations of a world that demands the Hyper-Availability of data. And our aim for the future is to expand on this vision to ultimately enable data to become self-managing. Veeam is in the perfect position to deliver on these promises of innovation and to radically improve how data is managed. Show more articles from this author

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

In June 2017 we announced that we would be working on support for the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) and shortly after in October we were able to show an alpha build of the code and demo what functionality would be arriving. Today we are excited and pleased to announce that our Hyper-Availability story is generally available for the entire Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform, allowing us to protect all virtualized workloads – VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV – in an application consistent state.Support for Nutanix AHV comes with a new product –– Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV –– which includes many of the same easy-to-use features and functionality from Veeam Backup & Replication in a familiar portable backup file format. This also includes the ability to align your strategy with the 3-2-1 backup methodology through one of our many Veeam Cloud Service Providers (VCSP) partners, tape or backup copy to disk for offsite backups and long-term retention.

Overview

Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV will consist of three components:

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 update 3a minimum

Veeam Backup Proxy Appliance for AHV

Veeam Backup repository (deduplication devices not supported in v1)

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a

The Veeam backup server is there to allow for authentication from the Veeam backup proxy appliance to give the ability to send backup files to the Veeam backup repository. The Veeam Backup Server also offers the ability for longer term retention to either tape, disk or Veeam Cloud Connect.

Veeam Backup Proxy Appliance for AHV

The proxy appliance will be deployed within the Nutanix Acropolis hyper-converged infrastructure cluster. Management of the appliance as well as the configuration, scheduling and execution of backups and full-VM restores will be handled by a new web UI, specifically designed to look and operate like Prism for familiarity, to Nutanix administrators and users.

Veeam Backup repository

The Veeam backup repository is a folder on a storage device that acts as a backup target that is managed by the Veeam backup server.

Features

Application consistency

The ability to take application consistent backups of your mission critical workloads is a must. This is achieved by requesting a Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) snapshot within the Nutanix AHV cluster. Nutanix guest tools (NGT) can then be used to trigger the preparation of the guest operating system for an online backup. For VMs where application consistency is required but NGT is not installed, Veeam recommends using the server edition of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows or for Linux.

Changed Block Tracking

When Veeam Backup & Replication performs incremental backup, it needs to know what data blocks have changed since the previous job session. To get the list of changed data blocks, Veeam Backup & Replication uses the changed block tracking mechanism, or CBT. CBT Increases the speed and efficiency of incremental backups. The backup process will leverage the AHV CBT for full and incremental backups.

Protection domains

The ability to leverage Nutanix Protection Domains not only means the ability to keep a short-term amount of fast Recovery Point Objective (RPO) snapshots in place but it also means that this same Protection Domain which is a defined group of virtual machines can be leveraged to simplify backup management also.

Workflow

The backup proxy communicates with Nutanix AHV to trigger a virtual machine snapshot, retrieves virtual machine data block by block from datastores hosting virtual machines, compresses and deduplicates it and writes to the backup repository in Veeam’s proprietary format.

Recovery

Now let’s get to the interesting part, the backup is the insurance policy that none of us hope we ever have to use, the recovery though is where we could be saving jobs and lives.

Veeam Backup Proxy Appliance for AHV

Recovery options from the proxy appliance will be full-VM recovery to the original location, performed from within the web UI. The ability to restore individual virtual machine disks is also possible from the web UI.

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a

When it comes to the granular restore options, it is required to be in the Veeam backup server to perform these tasks. Granular restore options include:

I am super excited to see the technical innovation happening within Veeam, the elevation of the Hyper Converged market leader as a Veeam elite alliance partner and the addition of the third hypervisor within the Hyper-Availability Platform. I am now even more excited to see where this product goes in the future. I strongly encourage anyone that has AHV deployed or under evaluation to download the fully-functional FREE 30-day trial today.

Veeam, born early in the era of the cloud, has created a story of unprecedented success. The story tells of rapid growth, accelerating quarter after quarter, year after year, driven by innovation, product quality, and customer loyalty. 2017 was our best year yet, and this year we continue to grow with tremendous wind in our sails:

Total bookings growth increased throughout 2017, with double-digit growth in every quarter.

Recently, IDC released their market share numbers for 2017, and once again, Veeam leads the pack with more than 26% of overall growth in market share gain. IDC shows that in the last half of 2017 alone, the top three vendors combined lost 36% market share while Veeam gained more than 26%. With this growth and success comes a sense of responsibility on our part to help customers see the future and prepare for the change and transformation that is coming. Company Momentum – Top 5 by Company Performance: 2017H2(Vendor Revenue, US Dollar, M)The question I receive more than any other, is how is it possible for Veeam to continue to generate such growth and success? Especially when one considers we reside in an industry that has a large legacy vendor presence with established, mature products. The answer is multi-faceted, but focuses on three key ingredients:

Built for the Virtual World – Veeam was founded in 2006 to provide systems management solutions for virtualized infrastructures. Veeam quickly became synonymous with data Availability, emerging as the go-to provider for solutions supporting applications and data in cloud-spanning environments. Born in the era of the cloud and built in the era of the cloud.

Partner First Philosophy – In today’s world of rapidly evolving technologies, no company is able to go it alone. Success comes from building and participating in robust technology eco-systems. It is our primary focus to approach every challenge with partnerships, from working with thousands of channel partners, to building deep integration and collaboration with the largest technology vendors in our space.

It Just Works – Veeam has earned a reputation in every sector of the market, including SMB, commercial and enterprise, as a product that delivers on its promises. A product that can be trusted to maintain business continuity in the face of any challenge or disaster. That’s why when customers talk about the reliability of Veeam, they say, “It Just Works.”

Receiving third party validation from IDC helps us continue to tell our story. This isn’t just what we say, but what hundreds of thousands of our customers are saying around the world. In addition, our Net Promoter Score of 73, a number generated by asking companies if they would recommend a technology they have purchased, is 3.5x better than the industry average. When an IT manager chooses an Availability vendor to be there for backup and recovery, they aren’t just choosing a technology. They are betting the future of their company and their own career on that choice. We understand the importance of this decision and take pride in earning that trust. Legacy vendors are struggling to adapt and change in the new environment. Their solutions, built during an era of tape and disk, have failed to keep up with the new demands of data growth and data sprawl. Without the ability to adapt, their customers find themselves vulnerable and looking for a change. Our vision is to be the most trusted provider of Intelligent Data Management solutions, exceeding the expectations of a world that demands the Hyper-Availability of data. And our aim for the future is to expand on this vision to ultimately enable data to become self-managing. Veeam is in the perfect position to deliver on these promises of innovation and to radically improve how data is managed. Show more articles from this author

Makes disaster recovery, compliance, and continuity automatic

NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator helps you reduce the time, cost and effort of planning for and recovering from a disaster by automatically creating plans that meet compliance.

Coinciding with its decision to eventually close its data center and migrate most of its workloads to the public cloud, the University of Notre Dame’s IT team switched to cloud-native data protection.

Notre Dame, based in Indiana, began its push to move its business-critical applications and workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2014. Soon after, the university chose N2WS Cloud Protection Manager to handle backup and recovery.Now, 80% of the applications used daily by faculty members and students, as well as the data associated with those services, lives on the cloud. The university protects more than 600 AWS instances, and that number is growing fast.In a recent webinar, Notre Dame systems engineer Aaron Wright talked about the journey of moving a whopping 828 applications to the cloud, and protecting those apps and their data. N2WS, which was acquired by Veeam earlier this year, is a provider of cloud-native, enterprise backup and disaster recovery for AWS. The backup tool is available through the AWS Marketplace.Wright said Notre Dame’s main impetus for migrating to the cloud was to lower costs. Moving services to the cloud would reduce the need for hardware. Wright said the goal is to eventually close the university’s on-premises primary data center.“We basically put our website from on premises to the AWS account and transferred the data, saw how it worked, what we could do. … As we started to see the capabilities and cost savings [of the cloud], we were wondering what we could do to put not just our ‘www’ services on the cloud,” he said.Wright said Notre Dame plans to move 90% of its applications to the cloud by the end of 2018. “The data center is going down as we speak,” he said.

We looked at what it would cost us to build our own backup software and estimated it would cost 4,000 hours between two engineers. Aaron Wrightsystems engineer, Notre Dame

As a research organization that works on projects with U.S. government agencies, Notre Dame owns sensitive data. Wright saw the need for a centralized backup software to protect that data, and found N2WS Cloud Protection Manager through AWS Marketplace. Wright could not find many good commercial options for protecting that cloud data.“We looked at what it would cost us to build our own backup software and estimated it would cost 4,000 hours between two engineers,” he said. By comparison, Wright said his team deployed Cloud Protection Manger in less than an hour.Wright said N2WS Cloud Protection Manager rescued Notre Dame’s data at least twice since the installation. One came after Linux machines failed to boot after application of a patch, and engineers restored data from snapshots within five minutes. Wright said his team used the snapshots to find and detach a corrupted Amazon Elastic Block Store volume, and then manually created and attached a new volume.In another incident, Wright said the granularity of the N2WS Cloud Protection Manager backup capabilities proved valuable.“Back in April-May 2018, we had to do a single-file restore through Cloud Protection Manager. Normally, we would have to have taken the volume and recreated a 300-gig volume,” he said. Locating and restoring that single file so quickly allowed him to resolve the incident within five minutes.